A q u i n a s & Sa r t r e

Stephen Wang

A q u i na s & Sar t r e
O n F r e e d o m , P e r s o n a l I d e n t i t y, AND

t h e P o s s i b i l i t y of H a ppi n e s s

  

The Catholic University of America Press

Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2009
The Catholic University of America Press
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

of American National Standards for Information Science—
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wang, Stephen, 1966–
Aquinas and Sartre : on freedom, personal identity, and the possibility
of happiness / Stephen Wang.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8132-1576-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Thomas, Aquinas, Saint,
1225?–1274. 2. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905–1980. 3. Liberty. 4. Identity
(Psychology) 5. Happiness. I. Title.
B765.T54W25 2009
128.092ʹ2—dc22 2008038321
 Conte nts

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix
Abbreviations xxiii
Notes about the Text xxv

Introduction 1
Aquinas: Historical and Intellectual Background 1
Aquinas: Philosophical and Theological Influences 6
Aquinas: Subsequent Interpretation 8
Sartre: Historical and Intellectual Background 10
Sartre: Philosophical and Theological Influences 13
Sartre: Subsequent Interpretation 16

Pa r t O n e Human Being
1. Identity and Human Incompletion in Sartre 23
The Nature of Human Action 23
Anguish, Vertigo, and the Ambiguity of Identity 24
Consciousness and Intentionality 32
Self-Consciousness and Being-for-Itself 37
Imagination and the Power of Negation 43
Lack, Possibility, and the Projection of Values 48
The Self, Selfness, and Personhood 53

2. Identity and Human Incompletion in Aquinas 58

Plants, Animals, and Human Beings 58
Intellect, Knowledge, and Immateriality 63
The Openness of the Human Form 69
Being, Goodness, and Perfection 74
The Will as Rational Appetite 79
Human Beings Are Not Sheep 84
vi = c o n t e n t s
Pa r t T w o H u m a n U n d e r s ta n d i n g
3. The Subjective Nature of
Objective Understanding in Sartre 93
Being-in-the-World 93
The Subjective Nature of Perception 96
Instrumentality and Purpose 98
The Perspective of the Body 103
The Objective Resistance of the World 107
Knowledge Is Human 111

4. The Subjective Nature of

Objective Understanding in Aquinas 117
Objectivity and the Human Subject 117
The Interdependence of Intellect and Will 121
Exercise and Specification 124
Reflexivity of Intellect and Will 128
The Will Activating the Intellect 135
The Possibility of Different Points of View 139
An Example: People in a Station 144
Understanding as a Subjective Objectivity 148

Pa r t T h r e e Human Freedom
5. Freedom, Choice, and the
Indetermination of Reason in Sartre 155
The Intentional Structure of the Act 155
Indetermination and the Projection of Ends 159
Choice and Self-Constitution 163
The Reasonableness of the Project 168
Temporality, Conversion, and the Unity of Life 175
Facticity and the Limits of Freedom 180
The Persistence of Existential Freedom 186

6. Freedom, Choice, and the

Indetermination of Reason in Aquinas 192
Desire for the End 192
The Indetermination of Particular Goods 196
The Indetermination of Ends 201
Freedom, Choice, and Preference 205
The Inconclusiveness of Reason 209
 c o n t e n t s = vii
The Influence of the Will over Reason 217
Intellectualist Readings of Aquinas 226
The Self-Movement of the Will 233

Pa r t F o u r Human Fulfillment
7. The Possibility of Human Happiness in Sartre 243
The Goal of Happiness 243
The Ideal of Self-Coincidence 245
Existential Denial and Human Relationships 247
The Link between Ontology and Theology 250
Failure and Hope 253

8. The Possibility of Human Happiness in Aquinas 256

Different Kinds of Happiness 256
The Impossibility of Perfect Happiness in This Life 259
The Possibility of Perfect Happiness in God 264
Sartre’s Theological Pessimism 267
A Natural Desire That Cannot Be Fulfilled Naturally 270

Conclusion 275

Bibliography 281
Works by Sartre 281
Works by Aquinas 282
Works about Sartre 282
Works about Aquinas 286
Other Works 289

Index 293
P r e f ac e

There are some profound similarities in the thought of Thomas

Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. The purpose of this book is to
show that these two thinkers, despite their many differences,
have a common philosophical understanding of the nature of
human freedom.
I am well aware that this suggestion will strike many read-
ers as being far-fetched. There are some obvious historical and
philosophical difficulties in the task of comparing Aquinas and
Sartre, let alone finding any connections between them. Aqui-
nas is the Scholastic theologian par excellence, completely im-
mersed in the atmosphere of medieval Christendom, a man
formed by his prayer and his preaching. Sartre is one of the
twentieth-century’s most notorious and influential iconoclasts,
the great antinomian, who could write that “existentialism is
nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a
consistently atheistic position.”1 Though they spent many years
in the same area of Paris, their lives were separated by seven
hundred years of intellectual and cultural history and by the
most fundamental differences in faith.
Perhaps for these reasons there have been very few writers
who have been interested in comparing the thought of Aqui-
nas and Sartre.2 Not even Maritain’s well-known work, some
of which sets out explicitly to evaluate and refute Sartre, re-

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” in Jean-Paul Sartre:

Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London: Routledge, 2001), 45. Sartre himself
softens this polemical statement in the lines that follow.
2. See, e.g., Joseph C. Mihalich, Existentialism and Thomism (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1960); Frederick J. Crosson, “Intentionality and Atheism:
Sartre and Maritain,” The Modern Schoolman 64 (1987); Joseph J. Romano, “Be-
tween Being and Nothingness: The Relevancy of Thomistic Habit,” Thomist 44
(1980); Gianfranco Basti, Filosofia Dell’uomo (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domen-

ix
x = p r e fa c e

ally does justice to Sartre’s project in Being and Nothingness.3 A 1996 edi-
tion of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly dedicated to Sartre
succeeded in bringing him to the attention of Catholic philosophers, but
it did not attempt to make many connections between Sartre and think-
ers such as Aquinas who stand at the heart of the Catholic philosophical
tradition.4 My own research has convinced me not just that there are some
points of contact between Aquinas and Sartre, but that their approach to a
number of key philosophical issues—centered around the question of free-
dom—is almost identical. In my conclusion I summarize this approach,
and try to present a combined Thomistic-Sartrean theory of freedom.
Here in this preface I offer a summary of the summary in order to give the
reader a taste of what is to come; and toward the end I make one or two in-
troductory points about how I have structured this work.
The best way to understand their common approach is to think of what
happens when we face a choice. When there are different options before
me, and I have to make a decision, a number of factors will usually influ-
ence that decision. Three of the most important factors are undoubtedly
who I am, where I am, and what I am seeking. In other words, my personal
identity, the objective circumstances in which I find myself, and the goals I
am seeking will all have some kind of influence on the choice I eventually
make. They make up what we could call the “total situation” that informs
my choice.
In philosophical theories about human action, it is common to assume
that this total situation, once I start reflecting on it, is something stable and
accessible. So when I have a choice to make, I think about what kind of

icano, 1995), 293–96; the brief reflections in Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Hu-
man Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 532; and M. Qizilbash, “Aristotle and Sartre on the
Human Condition: Lack, Responsibility and the Desire to Be God,” Angelaki 3, no. 1 (1998): 34,
endnote 13.
3. Existence and the Existent, for example, fails to get to the heart of Sartre’s distinction be-
tween essence and existence, and is more an exposition of Maritain’s Thomism than of Sartre’s
existentialism. Maritain wrongly insists, for example, that Sartre’s vision of the human being is
devoid of a place for an intelligible nature or essence. See Jacques Maritain, Existence and the
Existent, trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Com-
pany, 1956), esp. 15–16.
4. There is an essay on Sartre and Yves Simon, but most of the articles (comparing Sar-
tre with Foucault, Ricoeur, etc.) could have appeared in any general philosophical journal. See
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4: Jean-Paul Sartre (1996).
 p r e fa c e = xi

person I am (what would suit me, what I am interested in, what I am ca-
pable of, etc.); I think about the objective circumstances confronting me
(what is going on here, what needs to be done, what the practical options
available are, what the consequences of any action will be, etc.); and I think
about the goals I am seeking (what my ambitions are, what my hopes are,
what my fears are, what my dreams are, etc.). My understanding of this
total situation will be a starting point for the process of deliberation that
leads to making a choice.
Philosophical theories that are more “intellectualist” argue that my un-
derstanding of this total situation will determine which way the decision
goes: my will (my orientation to a particular course of action) will always
follow the direction suggested by my intellect (by my understanding of
what this total situation means). Philosophical theories that are more “vol-
untarist” argue that my choice will not, ultimately, be determined by my un-
derstanding of this situation: my will acts independently from my intellect,
and I can respond to this total situation in any way I like, even if it makes
no sense of what I have come to understand. It should be obvious that intel-
lectualist theories have a more deterministic conception of human action—
there is not much room for freedom. And voluntaristic theories have plenty
of room for freedom, but human action becomes irrational and capricious.
Aquinas and Sartre find a third way of understanding human action
that avoids both the determinism of intellectualist theories and the irratio-
nalism of voluntarist ones. They do this by questioning the very assump-
tions of these theories. They do accept the idea that certain factors have an
important bearing on our decisions and that our understanding of the “to-
tal situation” will determine how we act—this is why they are not volun-
tarists. But they both argue that when we deliberate about a choice, these
factors themselves are not fully determined. My personal identity is not
static: I can question who I am, I can reinterpret the meaning of my iden-
tity, I can rethink the significance of my life. The objective circumstances
confronting me in this choice are not clear-cut: there are different ways
of interpreting things, different points of view, different conclusions to be
drawn. And the goals I am attracted to are more ambiguous than I might
have imagined: I can make new priorities among the goals I already have, I
can set some of them aside for a time, I can even seek new goals that I have
never considered before.
xii = p r e fa c e

For Aquinas and Sartre, there is no single way of understanding the to-
tal situation before me. This is precisely why I face the dilemma of having
to choose, because each of the options before me is attractive and makes
sense on its own terms. Reason, when it confronts reality, is not led to a
single conclusion about what is going on or what should be done. This is
not because of any doubt about the objectivity of reality, it is because it is
part of human nature to be able to interpret reality in different ways, to
reinterpret the meaning of one’s own existence, and to redefine the goals
one is seeking. What is extraordinary about human beings is that we can
change the way we look at things, change the way we look at ourselves, and
change the goals we are seeking—this is what allows us to make a choice.
Freedom, on this model, is not about accepting or rejecting a predeter-
mined understanding of what a certain situation involves, it is our ability
to determine for ourselves which kind of understanding will guide our de-
liberations. The will neither follows the intellect (intellectualism) nor goes
its own way (voluntarism)—instead it is intimately involved in the very
working of intellect itself, and helps the intellect to determine which way it
will see the world. Freedom is still about deciding what to do, but for Aqui-
nas and Sartre the question of what to do depends on the deeper questions
of how to see things, who to be, and what to seek. All of this, it bears re-
peating, is done without denying the objectivity of reality, without falling
into relativism or subjectivism—since for Aquinas and Sartre it is the na-
ture of objective reality that it can be interpreted in different ways, and it is
the nature of human reason that it can consider these differences.
Reason is not fully determined. Human identity is not fixed. Happiness
can take many forms. These are some of the powerful insights that Aquinas
and Sartre share. Freedom is therefore not a capricious choice that turns
us against our rational understanding of what is important and good. It
is rather the necessity of interpreting the open-ended significance of our-
selves and our circumstances. Our freedom to choose between different
goals is inseparable from our freedom to interpret the world in different
ways, and to choose—within certain limits—what kind of person we will
become. This is why the question of freedom cannot be separated from the
questions of personal identity, of the nature of human understanding, and
of our longing for fulfillment in a future happiness.
Some readers may be unconvinced by these ideas. Others may be in-
terested in the ideas themselves, but may remain unconvinced that they
 p r e fa c e = xiii

represent the authentic teaching of Aquinas or Sartre. My main purpose

in this work is to show that Aquinas and Sartre both understand freedom
in this very distinctive way, and to show that these two thinkers, who are
not usually mentioned in the same breath, have so much in common. In
the process I hope that some other purposes will be served: Aquinas schol-
ars will benefit by rereading Aquinas in the light of Sartre. Sartre helps
us to see that many of Aquinas’s ideas about reason and personal iden-
tity are more radical than they seem at first. The link with Sartre will also
help students of Aquinas to see more clearly the relevance of Aquinas’s
thought to modern and postmodern debates. Sartre scholars will benefit
by appreciating that his key insights were already present in the philosoph-
ical tradition, even if they were underappreciated. This book does not sug-
gest that Aquinas directly influenced Sartre (although there is a clear line
from nineteenth-century Scholasticism to phenomenology), but it does ar-
gue that Aquinas’s philosophical precision can help us to unlock the mean-
ing of some of Sartre’s more puzzling or exaggerated thoughts about free-
dom. Contemporary philosophers investigating the questions of freedom,
objectivity, act theory, personal identity, human fulfillment, philosophical
anthropology, etc., will benefit from a fresh presentation of the thought
of two major historical figures who have contributed to these discussions.
Finally, these careful readings of the texts will provide some original in-
sights into the thought of Sartre and Aquinas that should be valuable in
their own right. This book corrects some one-sided views of each thinker
that have become predominant both in the popular imagination and in
academic thought: Sartre is not a voluntarist (if this is taken to mean that
human decisions are based on a gratuitous movement of the will uncon-
nected with one’s rational understanding of the world), and Aquinas is not
a intellectualist (if this is taken to mean that one’s practical decisions are
based solely on the conclusions reached independently by the intellect as
it interprets the world). I thus takes sides in some ongoing Sartrean and
Thomistic debates, and try to contribute to these debates.
A glance at the table of contents should make it clear how the book
is structured. After the historical introduction, there are four main parts,
which deal with (1) the open-endedness of human identity, (2) the rela-
tionship between objectivity and subjectivity, (3) the process of making a
choice, and (4) the possibility of finding fulfillment through our choices.
Each part presents Sartre’s understanding of a key topic and then that of
xiv = p r e fa c e

Aquinas. On the whole, the texts of one author are analyzed without much
reference to the other, so that each author can be understood on his own
terms, and so that the exposition is not prejudiced by the comparison
that is made. The comparison itself only occurs toward the end of each
part, and more particularly in part four. The similarities will stand out and
speak for themselves once the ideas of Sartre and Aquinas have been prop-
erly understood and placed side by side.
Each main part begins with Sartre, for two reasons. First, he is closer
to us in time. Despite the distance between English-language philosophy
and continental philosophy, Sartre’s ideas will be more accessible to many
readers than Aquinas’s. They are part of our culture—whether we like it or
not. It will help to look back through this more familiar figure to a more
distant one, presenting Sartre’s conclusions with all their force, then show-
ing that Aquinas reaches the same conclusions in a different philosophical
language—a language that is too familiar to many Christian theologians
and too alien to many secular philosophers to be appreciated properly. The
second reason for starting with Sartre is that this reflects the development
of my own ideas. As I began to work in this area, I found myself making
connections between existentialist critiques of the view that there is a fixed
human nature and the concept of character development in contemporary
virtue ethics. In both philosophies, human life is open-ended, and it is up
to us, within certain limits, to develop our own identity and form our own
character. This led me to investigate Sartre as the key exponent of existen-
tialism and Aquinas as a central figure in the development of virtue ethics.
The focus then shifted from ethics to wider questions of philosophical an-
thropology.
This book concentrates on some key texts from the writings of Aqui-
nas and Sartre. There are also references to the sometimes contradictory
interpretations of each philosopher that have been offered by scholars over
the years. On a few occasions, when the background is important, there are
references to the biographical, historical, or philosophical context in which
certain arguments were developed. I do believe, however, that each thinker,
in his own texts, is developing an argument that can be followed on its own
terms. While it would be a distortion to imply that Aquinas and Sartre are
interlocutors in a timeless debate about some supposed “perennial philoso-
phy,” it is nevertheless true that each thinker offers us a view of what it is to
be human, and these views can be discussed and compared despite their dif-
 p r e fa c e = xv

ferent contexts. It is essential to follow the line of thought that is being de-
veloped and weigh up the central insight that is being presented.
The advantage of concentrating on these key texts is that it gives a clear
focus to the work, and I can analyze in detail some difficult and highly nu-
anced arguments. The disadvantage of this concentration is that many im-
portant topics and connections remain unexplored. I spend far too little
time, for example, on Aquinas’s thinking about virtue, character, friendship,
right and wrong, or law; or on Sartre’s thinking about bad faith, the Look,
being-for-others, the body, or existential psychoanalysis. I do not move into
a discussion about concrete ethics and ethical norms, but remain at the
level of what could be called fundamental ethics or action theory. These la-
cunae threaten to distort the whole account of the human being presented
here. This is the price paid for specialization, and the distortion will not be
too great if one keeps this work in perspective and remembers that it forms
one small part of a wider philosophical anthropology.
There is an almost exclusive concentration in this work on the individ-
ual human being, which is a serious limitation. I make only passing refer-
ence to interpersonal relationships, the family, love, society, or politics—
subjects that Aquinas and Sartre deal with extensively. My only defense is
to refer again to the aim of this project, which is to examine the nature of
human freedom. All of our relationships, whether intimate and personal,
or diffuse and political, somehow involve bonds between individual hu-
man beings, and all of them depend somehow on our free response to the
relationship and our search for fulfillment in that relationship. So if we are
to understand the nature of society and of human relationships, we shall
have to understand what it is for the individual who is in relationship to be
free and to seek happiness. The communal and the political have to have
some basis in the personal.
One of the stumbling blocks to a sympathetic reading of both Aquinas
and Sartre is the teleological nature of their act theory. For these thinkers,
human beings are always seeking some goal or end (telos, in Greek), seek-
ing fulfillment in some form, and this raises the suspicion that in these
theories human action is unavoidably “selfish.” It is enough to say here that
a teleological theory of action leaves as much room for love, kindness, as-
ceticism, altruism, and self-sacrifice as any other theory—but these virtues
will always relate in some way to the self. In other words, in a teleological
theory, the most selfless acts—if they are mine—must relate in some way
xvi = p r e fa c e

to my choices, to my reasons for acting, and to my hopes for the future.

These hopes may be centered purely on the good of another, or on the ful-
fillment of a project that will benefit me not at all, as much as on the plea-
sures of my own body, or on the success of my own work. Whichever end
I choose, it necessarily becomes a part of my own project. I may not be do-
ing it “for myself,” but I am certainly doing it because I want to. The crude
categories of “selfish” and “selfless” are not very helpful here: Aquinas and
Sartre believe that we are always seeking our own good; the good is sim-
ply what we seek. The remarkable thing about human freedom, however,
is that it allows us to identify the good of another (and indeed the good of
absolutely anything at all) with our own good. So if I choose to give my life
for my spouse, my children, my country, or even for a stranger or an en-
emy, then there is no contradiction between this self-sacrifice and the self-
fulfillment that personal action always involves. The fact that we can seek
a personal good that means something to ourselves is the very thing that
allows us—if we so choose—to reach out to others and to place our good
outside ourselves.
It is important to recognize that Aquinas is a theologian whose un-
derstanding of human freedom cannot be separated from his Christian
faith and Sartre is a philosopher who appeals only to reason. Aquinas’s
whole thinking is thoroughly informed by his Christian upbringing, by the
Christian culture in which he lived and worked, and by the theological for-
mation he received. Divine revelation and Christian reflection color the
whole Summa.5 At the same time, however, within the theological flow of
the work, Aquinas constructs a number of philosophical arguments that
make sense in their own right and do not depend on theological convic-
tions or faith.6 Much of his analysis—of intellect and will, human action,
and the desire for happiness—depends on reason and not on an appeal to
revelation. The argument about happiness in the first questions of Part I-II

5. On the theological nature of the Summa, see, e.g., Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thom-
as Aquinas, Vol. 1: The Person and His Work (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of
America Press, 1996), 148–55; Leonard E. Boyle, “The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of St.
Thomas—Revisited,” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: George-
town University Press, 2002), 6–7; and Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans.
Sr. Mary Thomas Noble (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 21–25. See also my introduction
below.
6. Fergus Kerr muses: “Perhaps we should rescue Thomas from philosophy altogether—
but then, after all, he is a great philosopher, indeed that is one of the sources of the ambiva-
 p r e fa c e = xvii

of the Summa, for example, is philosophical, even though the conclusion

is also a theological conviction that would stand without the appeal to rea-
son. So when Aquinas concludes that human beings cannot be perfectly
happy in this life, the impasse he reaches is philosophical, just as Sartre’s is.
At this level, he and Sartre are doing the same kind of thinking.
The introduction that follows describes some of the historical and in-
tellectual context in which Aquinas and Sartre were writing; it looks at the
thinkers who most influenced them; and it examines some of the interpre-
tation of their work that has since taken place. Readers who are already fa-
miliar with these areas, or who simply want to begin with the philosophi-
cal discussion itself, are advised to skip over this introduction and begin
reading at chapter 1.

lence of his thought. He is a philosopher and he is a theologian, and we are never going to
agree where to put the emphasis”; see Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 2002), 210.
Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Many people have helped me in many different ways as I have

been researching and writing this book. I would like to acknowl-
edge some of them here and offer them my sincere thanks.
A number of people read early drafts of my work, or dis-
cussed it with me, and gave me invaluable feedback. These in-
clude Margaret Atkins, Bruce Burbidge, Martin Crowley, Kevin
Flannery, Thomas Flynn, Fergus Kerr, Aidan Nichols, Amanda
Perreau-Saussine, Emile Perreau-Saussine, and Ben Quash. Di-
ana von Glahn gave a great deal of time and attention to proof-
reading an earlier version of the text.
I began this research at the University of Cambridge, and
staff there at the Divinity Faculty, the Philosophy Faculty, the
University Library, and Queens’ College were unfailingly help-
ful. My stay at Cambridge was made possible by a three-year re-
search grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
My bishop, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, encour-
aged me to consider doing some academic research, and then
gave me enough time free from pastoral responsibilities in which
I could pursue it. Friends, colleagues, and those I lived with in
Cambridge gave me enormous support and encouragement,
and were patient and understanding with me when the pres-
sures of study took their toll. Alban McCoy, the chaplain at the
Cambridge University Catholic Chaplaincy, invited me to live at
Fisher House for two years and welcomed me into the life and
mission of the community there. Aidan Nichols, then the prior,
invited me to live in the Dominican community at Blackfriars
for the rest of my time in Cambridge. I have been finishing this
book while living and working at Allen Hall, London—the sem-
inary of the Diocese of Westminster—where the staff and stu-
dents have sustained me with their kindness and good humor.

xix
xx = a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

My family deserves a special mention: my parents, Man Kin and Elizabeth

Wang; my brother, Chris; my sister-in-law, Kerry; my nephew, Matthew; and
my sister, Mary.
Staff at the Catholic University of America Press have guided this work
through the publication process with great care and courtesy. Gregory La-
Nave showed the initial interest in this work and sent it off to expert read-
ers, James Kruggel gave me advice on revising it and saw it through the
process of being accepted for publication, and Philip Gerard Holthaus has
copyedited and proofread the final text. Three readers commissioned by
the press read the whole text and made detailed suggestions about how it
could be improved. One of these was Thomas Flynn; the other two were
anonymous. Their incisive and generously given comments helped me to
rethink and improve some key parts of the text.
Above all, I would like to acknowledge the support I received from
three people. Janet Soskice guided me in this work from start to finish.
She helped me to develop my initial ideas, to organize and write them up,
and then to revise and improve them. Christina Howells guided my work
on Sartre and helped me in my thinking about the whole project. Timo-
thy McDermott helped me to think through my ideas about Aquinas, and
talked more widely with me about Thomistic philosophy and theology.
All three, with great generosity, gave me the benefit of their time, interest,
expertise, and friendship. In their different ways they helped me to think
more carefully, to read and write with more sensitivity, and to approach
the truth with more humility and more love.
I am enormously grateful to all these people and institutions.

This book includes material reworked from the following articles: “Rea-
son and the Limits of Existential Freedom: Why Sartre Is Not a Voluntarist”
(Philosophy Today 50, no. 3, [2006]: 338–48); “Aquinas on Human Happi-
ness and the Natural Desire for God” (New Blackfriars 88, no. 1015 [2007]:
322–34 [published by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Provincial
Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers]); “Incomple-
tion, Happiness, and the Desire for God in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness”
(Sartre Studies International 12, no. 1 [2006]: 1–17); “The Ambiguity of the
 a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s = xxi

Self and the Construction of Human Identity in the Early Sartre” (American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81, no. 1 [2007]: 73–88); “Subjective Ob-
jectivity in Aquinas: The Interdependence and Reflexivity of Intellect and
Will” (Acta Philosophica I, vol. 16 [2007]: 91–108); “Motivation and the Es-
tablishment of Ends in Satre’s Act Theory (Sartre Studies International 14,
no. 1 [2008]: 13–25); and “The Indetermination of Reason and the Role of
the Will in Aquinas’s Account of Human Freedom” (New Blackfriars 90, no.
1025 [2009]; published by Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Provincial
Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers). These articles
are used with permission.

xxi
A b b r e v i at io n s

The Bibliography contains complete details on the following publica-

tions.

BN: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomeno-

logical Ontology

DM or De malo: Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de malo. The

main passage considered is question 6 of De malo (“Whether human
beings have a free choice of their acts or whether they choose from ne-
cessity”), which is just a single article that is then divided into sections.
For example, DM 6ad7 refers to the response to the seventh objection
in question 6. The Latin text is from the Leonine edition of Aquinas’s
Opera Omnia (complete works), vol. 23. The English translation is from
St. Thomas Aquinas, On Evil, translated by Jean Oesterle. The body of
this single article is very long, and for this reason, instead of just refer-
ring in the customary manner to DM 6c [corpus/body], I also provide
line numbers for each quotation in square brackets. These refer to the
line numbering in the Leonine edition.

DV or De veritate: Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veri-

tate. The numbers refer to the question, then the article, then the sec-
tion of the article. For example, DV 22:3c refers to question 22, article 3,
the body (corpus) of the article. The Latin text is from the Leonine edi-
tion of Aquinas’s Opera Omnia (complete works), vol. 22, parts 1–3.The
English translation is from Thomas Aquinas, The Disputed Questions
on Truth, translated by Robert W. Mulligan, James V. McGlynn, and
Robert W. Schmidt.

EN: Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénomé-

nologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943) and Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le né-

xxiii
xxiv = a b b r e v i at i o n s
ant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, édition corrigée avec index par Arlette
Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
Two page references are given for each reference to EN, e.g., EN 478/509. The
first number refers to the corrected 1996 edition, from which I have quoted. The sec-
ond number refers to the original 1943 edition, which is the one most often cited in
secondary works.

IM: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination, and Jean-Paul Sartre,
L’imaginaire
Two page references are given for each reference to IM, e.g., IM 12 [32]. The first
number refers to the English translation, the second in square brackets refers to the
French original.

ST or the Summa: Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae. The numbers refer to the
part of the Summa, then the question, then the article, then the section of the article.
For example, ST I-II.5:2ad2 refers to Part I-II, question 5, article 2, response to sec-
ond objection. The Latin text is from the Leonine edition of Aquinas’s Opera Om-
nia (complete works), vols. 4–11. The English translation is from St. Thomas Aqui-
nas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province,
5 vols.

TE: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Con-
sciousness, and Jean-Paul Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description
phénoménologique
Two page references are given for each reference to TE, e.g., TE 40 [23]. The first
number refers to the English translation, the second in square brackets refers to the
French original.
No t e s a b o u t t h e T e x t

In order to allow the reader to refer to commonly available Eng-

lish editions of the main primary texts, I use the translations
mentioned in the Abbreviations section. Sometimes, however,
I alter a translation slightly, without comment, if I judge that it
could be more suitably phrased. This is sometimes to correct
mistakes, but more often to make a translation more literal so
that it is easier to follow the philosophical vocabulary. In this, I
have been greatly helped by the work of Jean-Pierre Boulé and
Timothy O’Hagan, A Checklist of Errors in Hazel Barnes’ English
Translation of Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Norwich: Uni-
versity of East Anglia for the British Society of Phenomenology,
1987).
Translations of other non-English works are by me unless
otherwise noted.
If a citation includes italicized words or phrases, then these
occurred in the original texts cited, e.g., “C’est d’exister à distance
de soi comme présence à soi.” In other words, I have not added
any italics to cited words or phrases for my own emphasis.
When I refer to a part or a chapter (e.g., “We saw in chapter
3 that .....”) I am referring to a chapter in this book, unless it is
clear from the context that I am referring to another work.

xxv
A q u i n a s & Sa r t r e
I n t r o d u c t io n

Aquinas: Historical and Intellectual Background

Thomas Aquinas was born at Roccasecca, midway between
Rome and Naples, probably in 1225.1 He was an oblate at the
Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino and then a student at Na-
ples. After becoming a Dominican friar he spent the rest of his
life studying, teaching, and writing in Cologne, Paris, Rome,
and other Italian locations. He died in 1274 at Fossanova, south
of Rome, on his way to the Council of Lyon.
Aquinas was not teaching in a vacuum, and the questions of
freedom, identity, and happiness that concern us here were al-
ready much discussed in the thirteenth century. The cluster of
problems concerning human freedom and action that are de-
bated by contemporary English-speaking philosophers under
the title “freedom of the will” were discussed in the Middle Ages
under the heading liberum arbitrium, free decision or free judg-
ment.2 It was a matter of debate whether the will or some other
faculty was the bearer of this freedom—if it existed at all. Before
1. For biographical information, see James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas
D’aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1983); Simon Tugwell, “Thomas Aquinas: Introduction,”
in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings, ed. Simon Tugwell (Mahwah, N.J.: Pau-
list Press, 1988); and Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1: The Per-
son and His Work (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,
1996). When there are discrepancies in these accounts, I follow Torrell.
2. For this account of liberum arbitrium in medieval thought, see J. B. Ko-
rolec, “Free Will and Free Choice,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval
Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 630–34. The term predates medieval
theology and had been used in classical literary and legal formulations to indi-
cate the power to decide or the freedom to act; see Daniel Westberg, Right Practi-
cal Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), 81–82. A classic and still unmatched study is Odon Lottin, “Libre arbitre et
liberté depuis saint Anselme jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle,” in Psychologie et morale
aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1957), 11–389.

1
2 = introduction

the thirteenth century various aspects of human freedom had been distin-
guished (by Bernard of Clairvaux, John of La Rochelle, Odo Regaldus, and
others). In the early part of the thirteenth century William of Auxerre argued
that free decision is essentially an act of reason; Philip the Chancellor that it
is principally a matter of the will (although reason and will are in substance
the same faculty but two different activities); and an anonymous writer from
the same period that it is a third power distinct from both. The relation of
reason, will, and freedom of decision remained a major topic throughout the
century. It became characteristic of Dominican writers to associate freedom
closely with reason, and of Franciscans to locate it more in the will.
Happiness, beatitudo, was another concept with a long history.3 There
was a theological conviction, much influenced by Augustine, that true
happiness is to be found only in the contemplation of God in the world to
come. There can be no happiness in this world because “all men, so long as
they are mortal, are also necessarily wretched.”4 For the most part, prior to
the thirteenth century, the Boethian concept of happiness that grew out of
this attitude was generally accepted: the fragility of earthly things admits
of no perfect condition; and human happiness is to be found only in an-
other world where multiplicity is made one and fragility is exchanged for
permanence.5 Yet Aristotelian and even some Christian conceptions of hu-
man nature also understood happiness as the perfection of human nature,
in which human achievements must play some part. Is there such a thing
as a purely human good that can be attained by one’s own actions? What
connection do our present attempts to find fulfillment have with a future
fulfillment that will transform our very existence? There seemed to be a
need to distinguish between different types of happiness. It was William
of Auxerre (died 1231) who first made the theological distinction between
perfect happiness, experienced by the saints in heaven, and imperfect happi-
ness, which we can taste here in the present. It was against this background
that Aquinas developed his own interpretation of happiness.
One of the most significant factors that influenced in a more direct
way Aquinas’s teaching on subjects such as human freedom was the long-

3. See Georg Wieland, “Happiness: The Perfection of Man,” in The Cambridge History of
Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 673–79.
4. Augustine, De civitate Dei, IX, 15.
5. Cf. Boethius, Consolatio III, pr. 9 and 10.
 introduction = 3

running dispute about “Latin Averroism” or “radical” (or “heterodox”) Ar-

istotelianism.6 These are the modern labels sometimes given to a complex
of doctrines and interpretations of Aristotelian philosophy supposedly
arising from the teaching of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and accepted by certain
members of the Faculty of Arts in Paris in the second half of the thirteenth
century.7 One of the leaders of the Latin Averroist group was Siger of Bra-
bant, first mentioned in documents in 1266. There were political and terri-
torial aspects to the dispute: members of the Faculty of Arts wanted to as-
sert their independence from the Faculty of Theology. But the issues were
substantive: the “unicity” of the intellect (whether all human beings share
one intellect), the eternity of the world, the denial of free will, the restric-
tion of the influence of divine providence. Albert the Great and Thomas
Aquinas, among others, had been arguing against many of these Averroist
interpretations of Aristotle throughout the 1250s and 1260s.
Aquinas’s most direct involvement came in his De unitate intellectus
contra Averroistas, which refutes the doctrine that the possible intellect is
a substance separated from the body and the same for all human beings.
This polemical work was written in 1270, just before the bishop of Paris,
Stephen Tempier, seeing these teachings as a threat to Christian faith, con-
demned thirteen Averroist propositions on 10 December of that year.8 The
key issue for Aquinas is whether human beings are in control of their own
acts. If there is only one intellect, then there can only be one will (because
the powers of intellect and will are so closely connected), and this attack
on the knowing individual is what undermines all personal moral respon-
sibility.9 The knowledge gained by individual human beings must be di-
verse and distinct, even though it may be knowledge of the same thing.10
6. See Jan A. Aertsen, “Aquinas’s Philosophy in Its Historical Setting,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 24–25; Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works,
272–79; Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 182–94; and Gregory Martin Reichberg, “Aquinas on
Moral Responsibility in the Pursuit of Knowledge,” in Thomas Aquinas and His Legacy, ed.
David M. Gallagher, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 64–69.
7. There are doubts about whether Averroes himself is the actual source for these doc-
trines. See Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 192.
8. On the condemnations of 1270 and their background, see John F. Wippel, “The Condem-
nations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977): 169–201.
9. St. Bonaventure also connects the doctrine of determinism with that of the unicity of
the intellect for all human beings in a work of 1268. See Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 182–83.
10. Aquinas writes: “It is therefore one thing which is understood by me and by you. But
4 = introduction

I mention this Averroist dispute just to give one example in this introduc-
tion of how Aquinas wrote in a particular context, for a particular reason.
It will not be possible or necessary in this present work to go deeply into
the background of every aspect of Aquinas’s teachings—but at least we can
remind ourselves that there is a background, often with pressing political
and ecclesiastical features, as well as philosophical and theological ones.
The main writings of Aquinas considered in this work are the Quaes-
tiones disputatae de veritate, the Quaestiones disputatae de malo, and the
Summa theologiae, so it is worth giving some more specific background
to their composition.11 After lecturing on the Bible, the main academic
task of a master of theology in Paris was to take part in disputations—
some of them “private” (the master teaching his students within the con-
fines of the school) and some of them more formal and “public.” The texts
of the Quaestiones disputatae were often written up at some remove from
the original classroom discussions, but they reflect the way in which issues
were clarified by the thorough consideration of conflicting points of view.
De veritate, however, which seems to have grown out of private disputa-
tions, was adapted, written up, and distributed very soon after the discus-
sions took place—a testimony to the vibrancy of intellectual life in Paris at
the time. The disputes took place sometime in the three years of Aquinas’s
first teaching period as a master in Paris, from 1256 to 1259.
Question 6 of De malo, which concerns us most here, seems to have a
history independent from the rest of the text; but its date, and its signifi-
cance in an argument about the development of Aquinas’s thought, remain
much disputed. Torrell places it a little before or after the Avveroist con-
demnations of December 1270. But Kevin Flannery argues that it is a much
earlier work than usually thought, from no later than 1259, and that parts
of De veritate 24:1 are in fact based on De malo 6.12
it is understood by me in one way and by you in another, that is, by another intelligible species.
And my act of understanding is one thing, and yours another”; Thomas Aquinas, “De Unitate
Intellectus Contra Averroistas,” in Sancti Thomae De Aquino Opera Omnia, vol. 43 (Rome: Edi-
tori di San Tonomaso, 1976), book 5, 312.
11. See Tugwell, “Thomas Aquinas: Introduction,” 248–55; Leonard E. Boyle, “The Setting of
the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas—Revisited,” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope
(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 2–9; and Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas,
60–65, 145–55, and 202–4. I often suggest in this book that Aquinas “writes” something or other,
but in fact works such as the Summa was spoken in dictation to one of Aquinas’s secretaries.
12. See Torrell, St Thomas Aquinas, 336; and Kevin L. Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts (Edin-
burgh: T & T Clark, 2001), 247–49.
 introduction = 5

There is still disagreement about the exact times and places of com-
position of the various parts of the Summa theologiae. Of the two parts
that concern us (Part 1a, the Prima Pars—the first part; and Part 1a2ae,
the Prima Secundae—the first part of the second part), the Prima Pars was
probably begun in Rome in 1265 or 1266 and completed by the time Aqui-
nas left for Paris in late 1268 to begin his second regency there. The early
sections of the Prima Secundae may have been taught in Rome, but they
were probably not written up before Aquinas arrived in Paris. Torrell ac-
cepts R.-A. Gauthier’s textual argument that the Prima Secundae was not
written before 1271 since it draws heavily on a translation of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric that was not available to Aquinas before the end of 1270.13
Whatever the exact details of its provenance, the Summa marks a de-
cisive shift in Aquinas’s approach to teaching theology. Moving to Rome
in the autumn of 1265, to the community of Santa Sabina on the Aventine
Hill, he was given the task of setting up a studium for students from vari-
ous Dominican houses around the province as they prepared for priest-
hood and the Dominican apostolate. He was free to devise a curriculum of
his own, and free to break out of the narrow tradition of practical (moral)
theology that formed the heart of clerical studies at that time. The Summa
was designed to introduce beginners to theology in an orderly, intelligible,
and interesting way. He abandoned the traditional practice of basing his
own teaching on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and decided to give his
teaching a “dogmatic” or “systematic” theological structure. The moral or
anthropological part of the whole, the Secunda Pars, is thus prefaced by a
theological section on God, the Trinity, and Creation, and is rounded off
with a third Christological section on the Son of God, the Incarnation, and
the Sacraments. The study of the Christian life is given its proper theo-
logical context. Human beings are created by God, and only return to him
through the grace of Christ and the sacraments.14 The proper organiza-
tion of the Summa, as Ignatius Eschmann has emphasized, is understood
through the various prologues that punctuate the text.15 And so at the be-

13. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 145–46.

14. On the debate about the validity of applying the exitus-reditus scheme to the Summa,
see ibid., 150–55. M.-D. Chenu first proposed this Neoplatonic scheme, and it has been given
continued support by M.-V. Leroy. But A. Patfoort believes it is inadequate.
15. Ignatius Theodore Eschmann, The Ethics of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Two Courses (To-
ronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997), 10–12.
6 = introduction

ginning of the Prima Pars Aquinas proposes to teach sacred doctrine by

treating first, of God; second, of the rational creature’s advance toward
God; and third, of Christ, who as a human being, is our way to God.16

Aquinas: Philosophical and Theological Influences

Aquinas is often called an Aristotelian, and with much merit, but his intel-
lectual influences extend far beyond “the Philosopher.”17 Servais-Théodore
Pinckaers gives a list of the authors Aquinas cites in the Secunda Pars, ar-
ranged according to frequency of citations.18 The top ten nonscriptural
sources are: Augustine, 1,630; Aristotle, 1,546; Gregory the Great, 439; Pseudo
Dionysius, 202; Cicero, 187; Jerome, 178; John Damascene, 168; Ambrose, 151;
Isidore of Seville, 120; and Roman law, 102. The list goes on, and finishes with
Ptolemy, 1. The numerous citations themselves are merely the tip of the ice-
berg, and the influence of works such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and
Boethius’s De consolatione pervades the text. There are 1,839 citations from
the Old Testament and 2,003 from the New Testament. The Psalms, the Pen-
tateuch, the Wisdom Books, the Major Prophets, and the writings of Mat-
thew, Paul, and John predominate among the biblical citations.
The Scripture quotations are not just illustrative adornments or proof-
texts, they betray the evangelical dimension of this central anthropologi-
cal section of the Summa. The seemingly philosophical questions at the
beginning of the Prima Secundae about the final end are shaped by con-
siderations of the Gospel beatitudes, even though this is not immediately
apparent from the text. One would need to go back to Aquinas’s commen-
tary on the Gospel of St Matthew to see how his Aristotelian philosophy of
the human act is marked by his reflections on the blessedness proposed by
Christ in the Gospels.
Despite much revisionist thinking in this area, one can still cautiously
say that Aristotle is Aquinas’s deepest philosophical influence.19 The re-
ception of Aristotle’s works in Latin translation helped shape thirteenth-
16. ST I.2 Prol.
17. For the influences on Aquinas, see Boyle, “The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of St.
Thomas—Revisited”; and Servais-Théodore Pinckaers, “The Sources of the Ethics of St. Thom-
as Aquinas,” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
18. Pinckaers, “The Sources of the Ethics of St. Thomas Aquinas,” 17–18.
19. See the doubts summarized by Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 2002), 9–10, and the works referred to in the notes there.
 introduction = 7

century thought in Western Europe.20 The study of Aristotle spread through

the universities and was officially approved at the University of Paris when
the Faculty of Arts stated that its lecture programme must include all the
works of Aristotle. When Aquinas went to study liberal arts at the Univer-
sity of Naples in 1239 the natural philosophy of Aristotle was already studied
there. He began what would be an intense dialogue with Aristotle’s thought,
and he would go on to adopt Aristotle’s key philosophical convictions. But
there are significant Platonic elements in his thought too. At the beginning
of his career he uses the Neoplatonic scheme of the exitus-reditus (the going
out and coming back) of all things to structure his commentary on the Sen-
tences of Peter Lombard,21 and he uses the Platonic notion of participation
in metaphysics to describe the relationship between created being and God.
Nor does Aquinas confine himself to commenting on the works of Aristo-
tle. He writes commentaries on works such as De trinitate and De hebdo-
madibus by Boethius, and De divinis nominibus by Pseudo-Dionysius. Two
minor works by Aquinas, probably from his first years in Paris, show the
philosophical influence of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd):
De ente et essentia is marked by the thought of Avicenna on the nature of
essence, and Averroist ideas are reflected in De principiis naturae.22
One example of the continuing debate about the true extent of Aqui-
nas’s Aristotelianism can be found in the discussion of human happiness.
There are no doubts about Aquinas’s own views: imperfect happiness can
be tasted in this life, but perfect happiness can only be found in the next
life in the vision of God. The disagreement is about whether Aquinas is be-
traying Aristotle’s thought in the Nicomachean Ethics, or developing what
is implicit there, or fulfilling this thought in an unexpected but perfectly
compatible way.23 This connects with disputes within Aristotelian stud-

20. See Aertsen, “Aquinas’s Philosophy in Its Historical Setting.”

21. See Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 43, for the significance of this theological reorga-
nization.
22. Ibid., 47.
23. See Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human
Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America
Press, 1997), esp. 379–400 and 27–68; John Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Eth-
ics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 140–42; Anthony J. Celano, “The Con-
cept of Worldly Beatitude in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas,” Journal of the History of Philos-
ophy 25 (1987); and Anthony Kenny, “Aquinas on Aristotelian Happiness,” in Aquinas’s Moral
Theory: Essays in Honour of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump
(Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1998).
8 = introduction

ies about whether Aristotle’s highest form of eudaimonia (happiness, well-

being) is an “inclusivist” end (which contains multiple goods such as moral
virtue and contemplative wisdom), or an “exclusivist” or “dominant” end
(which would lie in the single good of theoretical wisdom); or whether the
Nichomachean Ethics is actually an unresolved text that contains contra-
dictory accounts of human happiness.
I support Denis Bradley’s nuanced conclusion that Aquinas’s doctrine
goes far beyond Aristotle’s, but is not incompatible with it: “Aquinas’s claim
that only the beatific vision will satisfy man’s desire for happiness falls en-
tirely outside of the ken of Aristotle’s philosophy,” and “the Thomistic no-
tion of ‘imperfect happiness’ does not rest on Aristotle’s admissions about
the imperfect character of human contemplative eudaimonia”; yet at the
same time “Aquinas thinks that his own doctrine, that men naturally de-
sire a perfect happiness, is plausible precisely on Aristotelian grounds.”24
As Anthony Kenny has written, Aquinas’s distinction between imperfect
happiness in the present life and the perfect happiness of divine vision
“corresponds to an ambiguity in book 10 [of the Nicomachean Ethics] it-
self,” where Aristotle encourages us to strive toward a contemplation that
is both a fulfillment of our natural human activity and something that is
constitutively beyond us.25 This particular discussion makes us aware of
the more general point, that Aquinas is an interpreter and not just a fol-
lower of Aristotle, and that Aristotle’s own position on many important is-
sues is far from clear even to scholars today.

Aquinas: Subsequent Interpretation

Aquinas’s work has generated divergent responses and controversy from
the very beginning. Only three years after his death, the bishop of Paris
censured a list of 219 theses, some of which have been associated (rightly or
wrongly) with the writings of Aquinas; and a few days later some “Aristo-
telian” positions associated with his name were condemned by the Faculty

24. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aqui-
nas’s Moral Science, 399–400.
25. Kenny, “Aquinas on Aristotelian Happiness,” 24. This ambiguity is carried into Catholic
moral theology in the debate about whether we can have a natural desire for a supernatural end.
For the issues involved, particularly as they are stirred up by proponents of the so-called new
natural law theory, see Benedict M. Ashley, ”What Is the End of the Human Person? The Vision
of God and Integral Human Fulfillment,” in Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour
of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe, ed. Luke Gormally (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994).
 introduction = 9

of Theology in Oxford at the behest of Robert Kilwardby, the archbishop

of Canterbury, himself a Dominican friar.26 Philosophers and theologians
have disagreed about the interpretation and significance of his work over
the centuries.
A particularly rich period of interest followed the publication of Leo
XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879 which endorsed Aquinas’s teaching
for Catholic students. The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of different “Thomisms”:
Désiré Mercier founded his Higher Institute of Philosophy at Louvain to
modernize Aquinas’s philosophy in the service of the physical and so-
cial sciences; the French Dominicans at Le Saulchoir read Aquinas as a
philosophical realist who would help them escape the dead ends of vari-
ous modern philosophical systems; Jesuits in France and Belgium such as
Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Maréchal laid the foundations for what would
later be called “transcendental Thomism”; Jacques Maritain was beginning
his Thomistic project by the 1920s; and Étienne Gilson’s historical inter-
est in Aquinas gave rise to “existential Thomism” after the Second World
War.27 In this later period further varieties of Thomism developed so that
by the second half of the century the differences between the approaches
of the various neo-Thomist schools were becoming more entrenched and
even irreconcilable.28
What are we to make of this cacophony of Thomistic voices? Near the
beginning of his book After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism Fergus Kerr
writes:
However celebrated his reputation as the “Angelic Doctor,” as doctor communis,
particularly since the revival of Thomism in the late nineteenth century, Thom-
as’s theology has always been in contention. If his theology is “angelic,” it is not
because it floats above and beyond history; if his teaching is “common,” it is not
because it has always been accepted.29

26. For a brief account of the events, and for references to some of the secondary litera-
ture, see Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 298–304.
27. See Gerald A. McCool, “Is Thomas’ Way of Philosophizing Still Viable Today?,” Pro-
ceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 64 (1990): 2–9.
28. For accounts of divergent twentieth-century interpretations of Aquinas, see the six es-
says in part 3 of Stephen J. Pope, ed., The Ethics of Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 2002), 355–455.
29. Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, 14.
10 = i n t r o d u c t i o n

Current readings of Aquinas’s work “are so conflicting, and even incom-

mensurable, that integrating them into a single interpretation seems
impossible.”30 Kerr, with others such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de
Lubac, and Etienne Gilson, is particularly impatient with the tendency of
twentieth-century neo-Thomists to calm and domesticate Aquinas and
turn him into an ally against the dark forces of modern philosophy rather
than an unsettling interlocutor. But the sheer diversity of conflicting inter-
pretations does not surprise him, and indeed for him it points to the rich-
ness and complexity of Aquinas’s own thought. Kerr quotes Balthasar, who
writes that Aquinas displays “an astonishing breadth, flexibility, and muta-
bility of perspectives which allow quite automatically the aporetic element
in his thinking to emerge.”31 Likewise, de Lubac writes that “the ambiva-
lence of his thought in unstable equilibrium, ransom of its very richness
[rançon de sa richesse même], explains how it could afterwards be inter-
preted in such opposed senses.”32
Now and then in this work I enter into the fray of contemporary
Thomistic interpretation and take a position. It will be important, for ex-
ample, to determine whether Aquinas did or did not change his mind sig-
nificantly on the question of the priority of intellect or will. Did he, to put
it crudely, move from an intellectualist to a more voluntaristic position?33
My main purpose, however, is to stay with the primary texts and to see
how the arguments presented there unfold. I hope to spend more time ex-
amining Aquinas’s ideas than those of his interpreters.

Sartre: Historical and Intellectual Background

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905.34 His father died the
following year, and he and his mother went to live with her parents in

30. Ibid., 15–16.

31. Ibid., 15; quoting from the article by Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the Tasks of Catholic
Philosophy in Our Time,” Communio 20 (1993).
32. Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, 15; quoting from the book by Henri De
Lubac, Surnaturel: Études historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 435–36.
33. See the section “Objectivity and the Human Subject” in chapter 4 below.
34. For biographical information on Sartre, see Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (Lon-
don: Heinemann, 1987); Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre (London: We-
idenfeld & Nicolson, 1986); the annotated chronologies in Michel Contat and Michel Rybal-
ka, eds., Les Écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, Bibliographie Commentée (Paris: Gallimard, 1970);
and Kenneth Thompson and Margaret Thompson, Sartre: Life and Works (New York/ Bicester,
U.K.: Facts on File Publications, 1984).
 i n t r o d u c t i o n = 11

Meudon. They moved back to Paris, then to La Rochelle (with his new
stepfather), and eventually settled in Paris in 1920. Sartre entered the pres-
tigious École Normale Supérieure in 1924 where he settled on philoso-
phy as his major interest. He taught philosophy in various places at lycée
level for most of the 1930s. He was conscripted at the beginning of the war,
captured, and sent to prisoner-of-war camp—from which he escaped in
1941 by posing as a civilian. He taught at another lycée in Paris for the next
three years. The rest of his life was spent as the archetypal French intellec-
tual: writing, editing, teaching, debating, lecturing, talking, traveling, cam-
paigning, resisting. The royalties from his books saved him having to take
a paid university teaching post, so he had an enormous amount of social
and intellectual freedom. He died in 1980.
Sartre was not a religious person, although he became more open to
religious questions at the end of his life. He had the distinction of having
his works put on the Index of prohibited books by the Catholic Church in
1948. He was baptized a few weeks after his birth at the church of Notre-
Dame de Grâce in Passy, presumably under the influence of his maternal
grandmother who was Catholic. He had a nominally Catholic upbringing,
and though he didn’t go to mass regularly, Sartre’s clearest childhood “reli-
gious” memories were of being taken to hear organ music in St. Sulpice or
the cathedral of Notre-Dame. He certainly knew Catholic priests well over
the years: Stalag XII D, for example, his prisoner-of-war camp at Trèves,
was full of priests, and as a writer and teacher he formed a natural bond
with them, joining in their Gregorian plainsong rehearsals, and teaching
them the ins and outs of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.
The subtitle to Sartre’s great work Being and Nothingness is “An Essay
on Phenomenological Ontology,” and he stands firmly in the phenomeno-
logical tradition of philosophy. In the last years of the nineteenth century
the work of Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel anticipated certain as-
pects of the Husserlian outlook, so there was a kind of receptivity to Ger-
man phenomenology among French thinkers. Husserl thus received a slow
but favorable reception in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and
was welcomed as someone who could develop themes present implicitly in
French philosophy.35

35. See Christian Dupont, “Receptions of Phenomenology in French Philosophy and Reli-
gious Thought, 1889–1939” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1997), 10–22.
12 = i n t r o d u c t i o n

It is interesting to note that Thomists were among the first intellectuals

in France to engage themselves with German phenomenology.36 The So-
ciété Thomiste held a study day at Juvisy, south of Paris, on 12 September
1930, to reflect on the philosophy of Aquinas in the light of the phenome-
nological movement. Jacques Maritain convened the meeting and pointed
to the fact that phenomenology was close to Thomism on account of its
roots in Brentano. Maritain paid careful attention to Husserl in his The De-
grees of Knowledge (first published in French in 1932). “Strange as it seems,”
writes Maritain, “at the very outset of the phenomenological movement a
kind of activation of post-Kantian philosophy took place by means of con-
tact with Aristotelian and scholastic seeds, as transmitted by Brentano.”37
This is not yet an encounter between Aquinas and Sartre, but one could go
so far as to say that the roots of both Aquinas’s Scholasticism and Sartre’s
phenomenology lie in Aristotelian soil.38
I will go on below to discuss in more detail the direct influences that
shaped Sartre’s thought. In this historical section it is worth giving a little
background to the composition of the text of Being and Nothingness itself.
This massive tome was written in about two years, between the summer of
1940 and October 1942.39 Sartre went into military service at the beginning
of the war and was sent to a meteorological unit. His light duties meant
that he actually had more time and space to think philosophically than he
had had when he was teaching in Paris; he was freed, physically and emo-
tionally, from past demands and routines; he was able to write; and the
fact that he had no philosophy books with him meant that had to think
through his own ideas for himself and rediscover the key thoughts of, for
example, Heidegger and Husserl without consulting them.
Sartre worked on finishing his novel L’Age de raison, but was impatient
to start his philosophical book about “nothingness.” He began this work in
the summer of 1940. It was written on the floor, since Sartre was by now
held in a large unfurnished room with fourteen fellow prisoners, and in
36. See ibid., 402–37. 37. Quoted at ibid., 437.
38. For Brentano’s influence on Husserl, see David Bell, Husserl (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990), 3–28.
39. See the biographical works mentioned above, and especially Hayman, Writing Against:
A Biography of Sartre, 148–66. We know so much about this period because of his letters to Si-
mone de Beauvoir and his war diaries, some of which survived. Hayman’s chronology, at 153–
210, differs slightly from Contat and Rybalka, eds., Les Écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, Bibliogra-
phie Commentée, 83–87.
 i n t r o d u c t i o n = 13

these conditions he had completed 76 pages by 12 August. He continued

working furiously on the text once he returned to Paris. Imprisonment
and then living under the Occupation gave a new edge and resonance to
ideas about liberty that had largely been worked out before the war. Be-
ing and Nothingness was completed in October 1942 and published in the
summer of 1943. It’s important to note that the text was completed in a pe-
riod when Allied victory in the war was far from assured. In other words,
the social and political context was one of defeat and not of impending tri-
umph. This monumental defense of freedom was written in a time when
freedom seemed to be an impossible dream.

Sartre: Philosophical and Theological Influences

It would be impossible to mention all the literary and philosophical in-
fluences on the young Sartre before the time of writing Being and Noth-
ingness.40 As he prepared to sit his entrance exam for the École Normale
Supérieure he was reading Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will and was
struck by its discussion of our consciousness of duration.41 Bergson’s idea
that human beings can only be understood as a flight into the future pre-
pared him for the German phenomenology he would later encounter. At
the École Normale Supérieure he struggled against the dominance of the
French intellectualist school mediated by Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier),
and would later find an antidote to this in the work of Gaston Bachelard
and gestaltists such as Wolfgang Köhler.42 In his year at the French Insti-
tute in Berlin (1933–1934) he was reading Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, and
Jaspers.43 He had some acquaintance with the work of Kierkegaard,44 and

40. See esp. Michel Rybalka, Oreste F. Pucciani, and Susan Gruenheck, “An Interview with
Jean-Paul Sartre,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp, The Library of Liv-
ing Philosophers Vol. 16 (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981); William Ralph Schroeder, Sartre and
His Predecessors: The Self and the Other (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); Thomas W.
Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Dupont, “Receptions of Phenomenology in French Phi-
losophy and Religious Thought, 1889–1939,” esp. 212–45; and Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenome-
nological Movement, 3rd ed. (The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), esp. 473–501.
41. See Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980),
30; and Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, 186.
42. See Adrian Mirvish, “Sartre on Perception and the World,” Journal of the British So-
ciety for Phenomenology 14 (1983), esp. 160–67, and “Sartre and the Gestaltists,” Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 11 (1980).
43. See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 485.
44. He later attributed his reluctance to familiarize himself with Kierkegaard’s work to the
14 = i n t r o d u c t i o n

of Hegel, although it seems that he only took Hegel up in a serious way af-
ter the war.45
The three dominant influences on his thought are undoubtedly Des-
cartes, Heidegger, and Husserl. Descartes was the intellectual starting point
in his formal studies.46 He corrected and built on this foundation but never
abandoned it: the idea of the cogito, of a consciousness conscious of itself,
questioning itself, and the liberty that comes with this self-questioning.
Doubt, as he wrote in his essay on Cartesian freedom, is what brings about
the power of escaping, disengaging oneself, and withdrawing; it is the basis
of humanism. No one before Descartes, Sartre believed, had stressed this
connection between negativity and free will.47 Ronald Hayman has writ-
ten that Sartre never forgave Heidegger for not taking consciousness as the
starting point of philosophy: “Underneath Sartre’s radicalism is a bedrock
of Cartesian conservatism.”48
Sartre had been acquainted with Heidegger’s philosophy at least since
his time in Berlin, but a serious study only began later in the 1930s.49 Sar-
tre certainly seized upon Heidegger for some of his insights, and in the
heyday of postwar existentialism their names were often linked. But by the
time of writing Being and Nothingness the differences between the two had
become more apparent. Heidegger becomes a kind of foil for Sartre, who
criticizes his focus on Dasein and his lack of attention to the constructive
role of consciousness and subjectivity. Heidegger, likewise, in his Letter on
Humanism,50 which was in part a response to Sartre’s 1945 lecture “Exis-

spelling of his name: “Before then [1939–40] I knew he existed, but he was only a name for me
and, for some reason, I did not like the name. Because of the double a, I think ..... That kept
me from reading him”; see Rybalka, Pucciani, and Gruenheck, “An Interview with Jean-Paul
Sartre,” 10.
45. See ibid., 9–10.
46. See Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, 31; and Busch, The Power of
Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy, 1–2, 5–7.
47. Translated as Jean-Paul Sartre, “Cartesian Freedom,” in Literary and Philosophical Es-
says (New York: Collier Books, 1962).
48. Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, 189.
49. See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 473–501; Michel Haar, “Sartre and
Heidegger,” in Jean Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silver-
man and Frederick A. Elliston (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980); and Francis
Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans. Robert V. Stone (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1980), 80–82.
50. Reprinted in English translation in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
 i n t r o d u c t i o n = 15

tentialism Is a Humanism,”51 is highly critical of the subjectivity that he

believes has infected all modern metaphysics. Sartre’s ontology of con-
sciousness is much closer, ultimately, to Husserl than to Heidegger.
The significance of Husserl in Sartre’s intellectual formation cannot be
overestimated.52 German phenomenology was in the air in France in the
late 1920s and early 1930s, but Sartre does not seem to have read any of the
several French introductions to the movement before the summer of 1933.
Raymond Aron first introduced Sartre to Husserl in the spring of 1933, and
convinced him that his philosophy would speak to Sartre’s own preoccu-
pations: overcoming the polarization between idealism and realism and af-
firming both the power of reason and the reality of the visible world as it
appears to our senses. Sartre then read Emmanuel Lévinas’s “La théorie de
l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl” and was immediately won
over. He went on to study Husserl’s Ideen in Berlin that autumn.
The initial attraction to Husserl seems to have been in the area of
method: here was a philosopher who allowed one to take seriously the ex-
perience of everyday life, the concrete experience of the novelist as well
as the reflective experience of the philosopher. In Berlin Sartre drafted an
essay that expresses his newfound Husserlian convictions: that the inten-
tionality of consciousness is what allows philosophy to overcome the sep-
aration between subjective experience and the objective world; that both
idealism and realism are bankrupt because of their common assumption
that knowledge somehow involves a mental space populated by some kind
of intermediary mental contents; that philosophy must start as a descrip-
tive science of the facts of experience rather than a transcendental reflec-
tion on the conditions for the possibility of that experience.53 There are
questions about whether Sartre fully understood Husserl’s project, and
he certainly ended up as a critic rather than a disciple—but there are no

51. First published in French in 1946; for an English translation, see Jean-Paul Sartre, “Ex-
istentialism and Humanism,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London:
Routledge, 2001).
52. See Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Phi-
losophy, 3–4; Dupont, “Receptions of Phenomenology in French Philosophy and Religious
Thought, 1889–1939,” 212–19, 35–45; and Thompson and Thompson, Sartre: Life and Works,
26–29.
53. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,”
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1, no. 2 (1970). The essay was written in the pe-
riod 1933–1934 but not published until 1939.
16 = i n t r o d u c t i o n

doubts about the initial effect Husserl had on Sartre’s thinking, and the
continuing force he exerted on his philosophical development.

Sartre: Subsequent Interpretation

The publication of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness stimulated many reac-
tions.54 From within the French phenomenological tradition, Merleau-
Ponty gave one of the most considered responses, both sympathetic to the
aims of Sartre’s project and fiercely critical of its underlying ontology of
consciousness.55 Sartre’s view of consciousness, for Merleau-Ponty, is still
dualistic: its openness to the world and its distinction from it are so em-
phatic that it has nothing to ground it. There is not enough emphasis on the
“interworld” between subject and object, where consciousness encounters a
set of predetermined meanings over which it has no control. Herbert Mar-
cuse is an example of someone who gave a more politically pointed reply
to Sartre’s exposition of liberty in Being and Nothingness: “If philosophy, by
virtue of its existential-ontological concepts of man or freedom, is capable
of demonstrating that the persecuted Jew and the victim of the executioner
are and remain absolutely free and masters of a self-responsible choice, then
these philosophical concepts have declined to the level of a mere ideology.”56
A. J. Ayer, in the English analytical tradition, at least showed some interest
in what was happening across the Channel, but he was famously dismissive
of Sartre’s use of the term le néant (“nothing”) to refer to an “insubstantial

54. For rich collections of essays that reveal many of the different approaches taken to Sar-
tre over recent decades, see Hugh J. Silverman and Frederick A. Elliston, Jean-Paul Sartre: Con-
temporary Approaches to His Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980);
Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, The Library of Living Philosophers,
Vol. 16 (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981); Robert Wilcocks, ed., Critical Essays on Jean-Paul Sar-
tre (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988); Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van den Hoven, Sartre Alive (De-
troit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1991); and Christina Howells, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
55. See the section “The Objective Resistance of the World” in chapter 3 below; and M.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1962), esp. part 3. The work was first published in French in 1945. On the differences be-
tween Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, see Monika Langer, “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: A Reapprais-
al,” in The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981);
Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, 187; and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Piotr Hoffman,
“Sartre’s Changed Conception of Consciousness: From Lucidity to Opacity,” in The Philosophy
of Jean Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle: Open Court, 1981).
56. Herbert Marcuse, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘L’être et le néant,’ ”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948): 322. See the section “The Persistence of
Existential Freedom” in chapter 5 below.
 i n t r o d u c t i o n = 17

and mysterious” substance.57 These references just give a taste of some of

the reactions roused by Sartre’s work.
There are a number of critical questions that have generated much dis-
cussion in the years since 1943 and could detain us now, but I will look
briefly at just two that have greater bearing on this present work: the first
concerns Sartre’s appropriation of Husserl; the second concerns Sartre’s
own philosophical development.
Did Sartre properly understand Husserl’s phenomenology? Did he cor-
rect it? Did he betray it?58 As early as 1933/1934, when Sartre drafted his The
Transcendence of the Ego, he was distancing himself from Husserl’s appar-
ent understanding of the transcendental Ego.59 For Sartre, the Ego in Hus-
serl’s scheme was in danger of becoming reified, and it was undermining
the transparency and impersonality of consciousness that made a philos-
ophy of intentionality possible in the first place. Sartre saw phenomenol-
ogy as a way of overcoming the idealism inherent in Kant’s transcendental
philosophy, but he feared that Husserl was drifting into Kantianism. This
is why Sartre insists in his The Transcendence of the Ego that there is only
a transcendent Ego (a personal identity that is an object to our impersonal
consciousness) and not a transcendental Ego (which would lie behind our
experience and constitute our fundamental identity).
Peter Caws sympathizes with Husserl and believes that Sartre leaves
no room for the “I” of consciousness: the total transparency of conscious-
ness robs us of the possibility of individuality and of personhood.60 Her-
bert Spiegelberg writes that Sartre’s critique of Husserl is unconvincing
and lacks an adequate grasp of the phenomenological issues involved.
“By denying [consciousness] a centre and the dimension of inwardness
he deprives it at the same time of its existential weight.”61 Thomas Busch,

57. A. J. Ayer, “Novelist-Philosophers: V. Jean-Paul Sartre,” Horizon 12 (1945): 19; and Phyl-
lis Sutton Morris, Sartre’s Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1976), 24–25.
58. See the section “Consciousness and Intentionality” in chapter 1 below.
59. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Conscious-
ness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957). See the in-
troductory essay by his translators, Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick.
60. Peter Caws, Sartre, The Arguments of the Philosophers (London, Boston, and Henley,
U.K.: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 52–60.
61. Herbert Spiegelberg, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and Sartre’s Existentialism,” in The
Context of the Phenomenological Movement (The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff,
1981), at 60.
18 = i n t r o d u c t i o n

however, argues that Sartre was an attentive observer of the Husserlian

programme and was in fact playing on an ambiguity within Husserl’s phe-
nomenology.62 James Edie believes that Sartre was actually being faithful
to Husserl without realizing it: the central ideas of The Transcendence of
the Ego are already in Husserl’s Ideas, and Husserl was fully aware of the
necessity of distinguishing between the “empirical Ego” (that gives us an
identity in the world) and the “transcendental Ego” (that lies behind our
intentional experience of the world and only becomes an “object” of con-
sciousness through reflection).63 What matters for us is Sartre’s percep-
tion of this disagreement, whether real or mistaken. It forced him to bring
more precision to his own understanding of intentionality and to clarify
the difference between the identity that constitutes us and the identity we
constitute for ourselves through our freedom. Later, by the time of Being
and Nothingness, Sartre would develop a more sophisticated take on what
the “impersonality” of consciousness did and did not mean.64
The other critical question worth examining briefly is that of Sartre’s
own philosophical development, and particularly the question of whether
he later abandoned the ontology of Being and Nothingness that is so central
to my own work. In later interviews he seems to repudiate an excessive em-
phasis on the scope of human freedom in his earlier work;65 and no one dis-
putes the fact that his later work, more concerned with politics and biogra-
phy, pays closer attention to the determining forces that mold our situation
and our personality. Under the influence of thinkers such as Freud, Lacan,
and Marx, Sartre’s notion of consciousness gave way to that of lived expe-
rience—where our identity is inseparable from the constraints and condi-
tions of the external world. Christina Howells writes that Sartre was led “to
reduce the slender autonomy of the individual subject as the transparency

62. Thomas W. Busch, “Sartre’s Use of the Reduction: Being and Nothingness Reconsid-
ered,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman
and Frederick A. Elliston (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980), 28.
63. James M. Edie, “The Roots of the Existentialist Theory of Freedom in ‘Ideas I,’ ” Husserl
Studies 1 (1984): 245–50; and James M. Edie, “The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s
Critique of Husserl,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24 (1993): 105–15.
64. See Leo Fretz, “Individuality in Sartre’s Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 71–83; and Rhi-
annon Goldthorpe, “Sartre and the Self: Discontinuity or Continuity?,” American Catholic Phil-
osophical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1996): 525–30.
65. See, e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Itinerary of a Thought,” in Between Existentialism and
Marxism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 44.
 i n t r o d u c t i o n = 19

and lucidity of consciousness [were] muddied by the murkier waters of the

vécu or ‘lived experience’ ” and in considering the growth of an individual
such as Flaubert in The Idiot of the Family “personal characteristics that Sar-
tre would previously have represented as part of a freely chosen project are
now interpreted as ineradicable structures of the infant’s facticity.”66
Despite these significant developments, I would maintain that the two
fundamental elements of facticity and freedom, which lie at the heart of
Being and Nothingness, remain in Sartre’s later works. The language has
changed, and the description is more nuanced, but Sartre does not give up
on his central insight that we have both to make ourselves and to recognize
that we are made, to inherit an identity and go beyond it.
In Being and Nothingness, what you might call “subjectivity” is not what it would
be for me today: the little gap in an operation by which what has been internal-
ized is reexternalized as an act. [.....] The individual internalizes his social de-
terminants: He internalizes the relations of production, the family of his child-
hood, the historical past, contemporary institutions, then he reexternalizes all
that in acts and choices that necessarily refer us to everything that has been in-
ternalized.67

Howells warns us against thinking that in the later Sartre human beings
are dissolved into the structures that traverse them. She quotes Sartre’s own
contention that human beings must maintain “the perpetually resolved
and perpetually renewed contradiction between man-as-producer and
man-as-product, in each individual and at the heart of each multiplicity.”68
In Sartre’s later works we are conditioned all the way down, and respon-
sibility is now more about identifying and integrating the many anteced-
ent influences that have conditioned us than abandoning them. But the re-
sponsibility remains, and within our conditioning we are free agents, able
to assume and make something of that conditioning, and not merely ve-
hicles for inhuman forces operating through us.69 So Sartre develops but
does not repudiate his phenomenological ontology.
66. Christina Howells, “Conclusion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 337.
67. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IX (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 102–3.
68. Howells, “Conclusion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” 342.
69. See David A. Jopling, “Sartre’s Moral Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sar-
tre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 105–8 and 130.
 Part One

H u ma n B e i n g 
 Chapter 1

I d e n t i t y a n d H u m a n I n co m p l e t io n
in Sartre

The Nature of Human Action

Human beings do many different things. Why, then, does some-
one do one thing rather than another? What explains the ac-
tion? Our answers to these questions will point to a great range
of “causes,” “reasons,” “motives,” or “motivations”—in ordinary
conversation we do not distinguish between these words very
carefully. Often, however, a satisfying answer falls into one of
two categories. A first type of answer tells us something about
who the person is and what the person is like: “She treats the
patient because she is a doctor”; “He runs away because he is
a coward”; “They go to the cinema because they like films.”
These explanations refer in some way to the identity of the act-
ing person. A second type of answer says something about the
circumstances that give rise to the activity: “We feed the chil-
dren because they are hungry”; “He washes the cup because it
is dirty”; “I get out of bed because the office where I work opens
in an hour.” These explanations refer in some way to the objec-
tive demands of the situation, to whatever it is that needs mov-
ing forward or putting right, to the change that needs bringing
about in the world. So we can understand why human beings
act by looking to some aspect of their personal identity or to
the objective demands to which they respond.
Jean-Paul Sartre, however, is unsatisfied with this kind of ex-
planation because he thinks it is back to front. It is not true, in his

23
24 = h u m a n b e i n g

view, that we act in a certain way because of our identity and the objective
demands we meet. Rather, it is by acting in a certain way that we establish a
particular identity and allow a certain set of demands to guide our action.
Instead of saying “He runs away because he is a coward,” we should say “He
is a coward because he runs away.” Instead of saying “I get out of bed because
I have to be at the office in an hour,” we should say “It is by getting out of bed
that I turn the possibility of going to work into an obligation.” These descrip-
tions are counterintuitive and may seem forced; they may even strike some
readers as patently false. Surely, to take one of the other examples, she is a
qualified doctor, whether she treats the patient or not. Surely the cup is dirty,
whether he washes it or not. I hope to clarify in this chapter what Sartre does
and doesn’t mean by his awkward inversion of everyday language. He wants
to show that our freely chosen actions establish our identity and give force
to certain demands. Our commitments allow us to become people we might
not have become and illuminate a set of priorities that might have remained
obscure. We are not slaves to our being but creators of our existence.
In his reflections on action Sartre goes to the very heart of what it is to
be human. He shows that our free actions are not the consequence of our
identity, they are its foundation, and it is our nature as human beings al-
ways to go beyond who we are toward a freely chosen self. In this chapter
we will examine the ambiguity of human identity that arises because of the
nature of human consciousness as being-for-itself. Then we will be in a po-
sition to understand how human beings create imaginative possibilities for
themselves and choose to pursue certain of these possibilities, thus estab-
lishing their identity as persons.

Anguish, Vertigo, and the Ambiguity of Identity

It should be made clear at the outset of this chapter that Sartre is very
aware of the many factors that do constitute an identity for each human
being. His aim is not to deny the reality of human identity but to question
whether it is enough to account for one’s actions. It is worth alluding to
some of these factors that make up our identity as human beings in Being
and Nothingness.1
La facticité (“facticity”) is the word Sartre uses to stand for the innu-

1. BN is subtitled “An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.” Its four parts deal with “The
Problem of Nothingness” (negation, bad faith, etc.), “Being-for-Itself ” (presence to self, factic-
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 25

merable facts about our life that we have not chosen.2 These make up the
contingency of our being, the sense in which our life is given, discovered,
inherited, and dependent on circumstances outside our control. We are
bodily creatures, in a certain time and place, with a personal history, living
in certain conditions. There are many undeniable facts about our individual
psychology. Sartre lists the various characteristics, habits, states, etc., that
make up the psychic unity of our ego.3 These include not only latent quali-
ties that inform our behavior (such as industriousness, jealousy, ambition)
and actual states that embody a certain behavior (such as loving or hating),
but also a whole pattern of acts. Our acts manifest the unified purposes of
the psyche as they are embodied in the world. Human acts take on a kind of
objectivity and our purposes unfold with some continuity: boxers train, sci-
entists do research, artists create their work, politicians campaign.
Our individual facticity is itself dependent on a particular language,
a concrete community, a political structure, and on being part of the hu-
man species.4 We are, in other words, natural and cultural beings who at
no point determine the conditions and facts of our being. If we need this
complex environment in order to have an identity, we also need relation-
ships with other people in order to comprehend our own identity. It is
through the mediation of others that we can apprehend ourselves. We ap-
preciate ourselves in a new way, for example, when we are known or de-
sired or loved. “I recognize I am as the other [autrui] sees me”5; “I see my-
self because somebody sees me.”6
In these different ways Sartre reveals an immensely rich understanding
of all that makes up an individual human life, and concerns himself deeply
with questions of sociology, culture, language, psychology, and human re-
lations. All of this makes up the facticity of our being, the givenness of our
unique human identity. We should remember throughout this chapter that
Sartre never denies that human beings have an essence: “Essence is every-
thing about the human being which we can indicate by the words: that is.”7
For each human being, “certain original structures are invariable.”8

ity, temporality, knowledge, etc.), “[Being] For-Others” (the look, the body, relationships, etc.),
and “Having, Doing, and Being” (freedom, psychoanalysis, etc.).
2. BN 79–84; EN 115–20/122–27. 3. BN 162–70; EN 197–206/209–18.
4. BN 509–31; EN 554–76/591–615. 5. BN 222; EN 260/222.
6. BN 260; EN 299/318. 7. BN 35; EN 70/72.
8. BN 456; EN 500/532.
26 = h u m a n b e i n g

Rather than being antiessentialist, Sartre’s philosophy could be termed

a “qualified essentialism.”9 His sole qualification is that the human essence
is never enough. Sartre emphasized that the totality of essence that consti-
tutes our identity cannot adequately define a human being as human be-
cause our consciousness of this totality is an essential aspect of our being.
We have a relationship with the totality, an attitude to it, a responsibility
for it. It’s for this reason, as we shall now see, that human identity is ambig-
uous, insecure, and insufficient to account for our actions.
In a section of Being and Nothingness concerning angoisse (“anguish”),
Sartre gives two examples of individuals who discover that their identity
is insecure. First, the cliff walker.10 Someone is walking along the side of
a dangerous cliff, on a narrow path, without a guardrail. He is anxious.
It is not a straightforward fear that the path will give way (it looks firm
enough) or that a gust of wind will knock him over (the air is calm), it is
a fear that he might willingly throw himself off and jump to his death. He
doesn’t trust himself.
Many people have had an experience of vertigo akin to this. On the
one hand, looking into the abyss, we want to live; on the other hand, we
become aware of our freedom. We notice that the “desire to live” is not an
unchangeable part of our psychological makeup. We observe it. The more
we reflect on it, the more we realize that we are not bound by it, and we be-
come dizzy with the possibilities that open up before us. We could be reck-
less and jump, for no reason at all, and this is what really terrifies us. It’s
a very particular example, but it illustrates the way our confidence in our
identity can suddenly be undermined. In the most ordinary situations we
can be struck with vertigo: we may suddenly appreciate, for example, that
we can do something in a different way, that we can rethink our priorities,
that we can change, that we don’t have to be the person we have been. Hu-
man identity is ambiguous. Normally we enjoy the security of moving for-

9. He was afraid that a so-called Aristotelian philosophy of essence would involve the to-
tal determination of the individual, but in fact his own view is compatible with an Aristotelian
theory of natural kinds. For Sartre’s suspicions about Aristotelianism, see Thomas C. Ander-
son, “Sartre and Human Nature,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1996).
For the compatibility of Sartre and Aristotle, see M. Qizilbash, “Aristotle and Sartre on the Hu-
man Condition: Lack, Responsibility and the Desire to Be God,” Angelaki 3, no. 1 (1998); and
Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism (Balti-
more, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 87–88.
10. BN 30–32; EN 65–67/67–69.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 27

ward steadily on the basis of who we are, but now and then we are struck
by a parallel awareness that we could be someone else.
The experience of vertigo is one form of anguish: we realize that we
cannot guarantee the perpetuation of the motives that have influenced
us up to this point. Identity is not a straight-jacket, it does not predeter-
mine the future. At this moment, halfway along the dangerous path, we
may feel confident; but in a few steps, who knows what we might do? “If
nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitat-
ing myself into the abyss. The decisive conduct will emanate from a me [un
moi] which I am not yet.”11 Normally, of course, most people finish their
walk safely. Sartre wants us to realize that the decision to walk carefully is
not determined by our identity; instead, it is the decision itself that deter-
mines our identity and ensures that we continue to be people who want to
live. It’s a subtle distinction, the importance of which will become more
apparent.
The second example of anguish is the reformed gambler.12 This person
has sincerely decided never to gamble again. He has taken a firm resolu-
tion to quit. He considers himself to be a reformed gambler, and he relies
on this identity to get him through the temptations that come his way. Yet
now, as he nears the gaming table, his resolution melts away.
What he apprehends then in anguish is precisely the total inefficacy of the past
resolution. It is there, doubtless, but fixed, ineffectual, surpassed [dépassée] by
the very fact that I am conscious of it. The resolution is still me to the extent that
I realize constantly my identity with myself across the temporal flux, but it is no
longer me—due to the fact that it has become an object for my consciousness. I
am not subject to it, it fails in the mission which I have given to it.13

The identity the gambler established for himself as reformed is fragile.

He wishes it constrained him and guaranteed his new way of life, but this
very wish betrays his knowledge that both gambling and not gambling are
equally possible for him. The present identity (as resolved and reformed)
is illusory, it is really a memory of a previous identity (who he was at the
time of his resolution)—it is already surpassed and it will not be effective
unless it is remade once more.

11. Sartre often oscillates between the first and third person; see BN 32; EN 67/69.
12. BN 32–33; EN 67–69/69–71. 13. BN 33; EN 68/70.
28 = h u m a n b e i n g

The cliff walker is anguished because he can’t ensure that his present
resolution to live will survive all the way along the path; the gambler is an-
guished because his past resolution not to gamble isn’t sustaining him in the
present. For both characters, their very consciousness of an identity comes
with a corresponding detachment as they realize that they are not bound by
it. By searching for reasons, they objectify them and make them ineffective.
This realization is what paralyzes Matthieu in Sartre’s novel The Age of Rea-
son. He wants to justify his actions and base them on good reasons, or at
least on some overwhelming desire, but by interrogating these motives, by
trying to establish whether they are compelling, he distances himself from
them. The process of examining them shows they have no binding power
over his future; the search for obligations leads him to freedom because it
uncovers the fact that alternative courses of action are also viable.14
However strong it seems, the price of being conscious of an identity is
a corresponding liberation from that identity, and an ever-present respon-
sibility for continuing or denying that identity. We experience this respon-
sibility through anguish. This is not just a point about the fact that our
identities change for various reasons, since anguish does not come about
when a past identity is forgotten and a new one adopted. Instead, anguish
is a sign that human beings are separated from themselves, from the very
identities that constitute who they are now. We can review the present and
not just the past. We have a continual responsibility to re-create our iden-
tity through our choices.
Sartre’s examples may seem extreme: we are not often paralyzed by
vertigo or struggling with addiction. The reader may suspect that he is de-
liberately choosing to examine situations that lie outside our normal ex-
perience of deliberating and acting, moments of high drama or psychopa-
thology. Anguish, perhaps, should be confined to the world of the novelist
or the consulting rooms of the psychiatrist. There are a few brief responses
to this. First, it is often only in moments of crisis or difficulty or extremity
that we appreciate the fragility of our own identity. Second, such moments
may not occur often in the life of any individual, but they seem to occur in
some form to most human beings, and in this sense Sartre’s examples have
a wide applicability. Third, the heightened sensitivity we have in extraor-
dinary situations can give us a greater appreciation for what is happening

14. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason (London: Penguin Books, 2001).
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 29

in ordinary life. Sartre believes that in theory we can stop at any moment
and reflect in this way. Aquinas, in a similar vein, will use murder, adul-
tery, and shipwreck to exemplify universal aspects of the process of human
deliberation. Fourth, if in the most ordinary of circumstances we were to
have an experience of anguish, this experience would actually make those
circumstances seem extraordinary. Anguish by definition undermines our
identity and disrupts our world, so even if we chose examples that were set
safely within the confines of mundane human behavior they would never-
theless prove to be unusual and disruptive. In other words, it is impossible
to talk about a routine experience of anguish since anguish necessarily un-
dercuts our routine.
There are many ways of trying to avoid the responsibility for ourselves
that comes with anguish. In Sartre’s scheme they all come under the head-
ing of la mauvaise foi (“bad faith” or “self-deception”). For our purposes
the most instructive type of bad faith is la sincérité (“sincerity”). This is a
technical term in Sartre’s vocabulary. It is the attempt to be who we are,
to make our life match our identity, to conform our external actions with
our supposed inner reality.15 Sartre’s first example is a little misleading: the
café waiter who tries so hard to make the right gestures and voices that he
seems awkward and patronizing.16 We might say that he is simply not be-
ing a good waiter, but Sartre is interested in the way he strains too hard to
match his actions with some conception of who he is. The real contradic-
tion lies in his desire to make himself what he believes himself to be. “What
are we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we
are, if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are?”17 The
ideal of sincerity, to be what one is, “supposes that I am not originally what
I am.”18 So as soon as we spot whatever “essential” aspect of our being it is
that we want to achieve, we realize that we are neither identified with this
nor bound by it. To explain or excuse our behavior with reference to “who
we are” is already to put some distance between our present actions and
the past “identity” that supposedly caused it. We stake a claim to a “self ”
(soi) and immediately betray our distance from it.

15. A better translation might be “genuine,” which has the connotation of matching up to
what we really are—in contemporary English the word “sincere” implies simply wanting to tell
the truth.
16. BN 59–60; EN 94–95/98–100. 17. BN 59; EN 93–94/98.
18. BN 62; EN 97/102.
30 = h u m a n b e i n g
Total, constant sincerity as a constant effort to adhere to oneself [à soi] is by na-
ture a constant effort to dissociate oneself from oneself [se désolidariser de soi].
One frees oneself from oneself by the very act by which one makes oneself an
object for oneself [On se libère de soi par l’acte même par lequel on se fait objet
pour soi]. To draw up a perpetual inventory of what one is means constantly to
redeny oneself and to take refuge in a sphere where one is no longer anything
but a pure, free look [un pur et libre regard].19

The list of characteristics that can form this “inventory” is wide-ranging:

we try to identify not only with our public roles, but also with our atti-
tudes, our emotions, our moral character, our sexual preferences.20 By re-
ferring to these we can give ourselves a reason to act, but we should also
acknowledge that we freely choose to refer to them and that they do not
constrain us.
Through anguish the reformed gambler apprehends “the permanent
rupture of determinism.”21 Anguish is thus one manifestation of freedom,
which is characterized “by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the
Me [le Moi] which designates the free being.”22 Sartre uses the terms moi
(“me”) and essence (“essence”) to refer to that aspect of human identity
which at each moment is inherited from the past. The moi has a historical
content that has to be reaffirmed, adjusted, or rejected as soon as it is rec-
ognized. Essence is what we have been and what we are—it is the past as
it impinges on the present and forms it. “Due to this fact it is the totality
of characteristics which explain the act.”23 But we must keep in mind Sar-
tre’s two examples of anguish: the characteristics that are allowed to con-
stitute the person’s identity at each moment depend on which act he freely
chooses and not the other way round. The gambler’s resolution is impor-
tant only if he is keeping it; the walker’s desire to live protects him only if
he preserves it at each step. For this reason Sartre writes:
The act is always beyond the essence; it is a human act only insofar as it sur-
passes every explanation which we can give of it, precisely because anything
that one can describe in the human being by the formula “that is,” by that very
fact has been.24

19. BN 65; EN 100/106. 20. BN 55–67; EN 89–102/94–104.

21. BN 33; EN 68/70. 22. BN 35; EN 70/72.
23. BN 35; EN 70/72. 24. BN 35; EN 70/72.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 31

Sartre summarizes this idea later in Being and Nothingness concluding with
one of his most misunderstood phrases:
By the sole fact that I am conscious of the motives which inspire my action,
these motives are already transcendent objects for my consciousness; they are
outside. In vain shall I seek to catch hold of them; I escape them by my very ex-
istence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the moti-
vations and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free.25

The language may sound overblown (there is not much difference between
saying “I am free” or “I am always free” and “I am condemned to be free”),
but the truth conveyed is clear: if we are conscious of and present to any
aspect of our identity, then it loses its hold over us and we have to choose
how to respond to it. It’s important to remember that Sartre does not deny
that human beings have an essence, he simply denies that this essence can
be enough to determine our choices. It is in this significant but limited
sense that we are forever beyond our essence.
We should clear up some possible misunderstandings at this stage.
First, Sartre never imagines that anguish is present within all our activities.
He acknowledges that in most everyday situations we are acting without
anguish; we are usually caught up in things without much reflection, tak-
ing for granted a certain identity and certain goals.26 Even in the midst of
the most spontaneous or habitual act, however, “there remains the possi-
bility of putting this act into question.”27
Second, there is no suggestion that our identity is cut off from a world
of causes and influences. Take the café waiter: He may avoid sincerity and
freely choose what to make of his life and his role. Yet his starting point is
that he is a café waiter—this is the facticity of his situation, and it makes
the drama of realizing what it means for him to be a waiter quite different
from “the drama pure and simple” (i.e., without any facts to ground it) of
pretending to be a diplomat or a sailor when he is not.28 However we re-
spond to the facticity of our essence, it remains present to us as a factual
necessity even if we reconstruct it through our decisions about how to act.

25. BN 439; EN 484/515.

26. BN 35–36; EN 70–71/73–74. Cf. the discussion of unreflective consciousness in TE 48–
49 [31–32], where we act in a world of objects, which have values and qualities, without any re-
flection on the moi that is acting.
27. BN 36; EN 71/74. 28. BN 83; EN 119/126.
32 = h u m a n b e i n g

Third, Sartre does not think that everything human beings do is within
their control. He would accept that many “actions” that human beings “do”
are involuntary (we hiccup, sleepwalk, blush), many are instinctive (we
eat when we are hungry, we smash things in anger, we run from danger),
many unfold almost unconsciously (we drive with astounding skill while
on a kind of mental autopilot, we sing a song without paying it much at-
tention), and many have unforeseen consequences. He notes, for example,
that “the careless smoker who has through negligence caused the explosion
of a powder magazine has not acted.”29 Sartre simply says that sometimes
we are conscious that an action is ours, conscious that there are alternative
courses of action. The fact that we can take a view on certain actions, that
we can deliberate and decide between alternative possibilities, shows that
in these cases we are free to determine the course of our action. Only a de-
liberated act such as this can be an acte humain, a “human act.”30
Fourth, Sartre’s argument is not undermined by someone insisting that
this experience of detachment and freedom is just an illusion: “You think
you are free, but really everything is determined, and even your belief in
freedom is psychologically determined.” Sartre’s method is phenomeno-
logical. He starts with human experience and tries to clarify what is found
within that experience. In this case, we do not experience a psychological
belief that “we are detached and free,” some stubborn conviction that would
form the basis of our philosophy. Rather, we experience the detachment it-
self. It is not a conclusion or an implication. Anguish is the very experi-
ence of being unable to identify with our presumed identity, of being at a
distance from who we are, of having to choose without adequate grounds
for choosing, of having to be free. This is the starting point of Sartre’s phe-
nomenology, the original data on which his philosophy is built. It does not
reveal a prejudice in favor of freedom. On the contrary, to insist that all hu-
man actions are determined would be to impose a prejudice on the data of
experience and contradict it. This prejudice would be a form of bad faith.

Consciousness and Intentionality

Our experience of anguish and of freedom in certain situations comes
about because of the nature of human experience as such. Sartre empha-

29. BN 433; EN 477/508.

30. BN 35; EN 70/72.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 33

sizes that we experience everything as conscious beings. We are conscious

of what we experience and aware of this very consciousness. We are present
to ourselves, and consequently distant from ourselves, and the ambiguity
we experience with respect to a given identity refers to a more fundamen-
tal ambiguity at the heart of our being. Anguish and freedom, therefore,
lead us to a discussion of human consciousness.
In his understanding of human beings, Sartre’s debt to Husserl is enor-
mous.31 Before discovering Husserl he felt that French philosophy at the
time offered him two options: idealism, which placed the subject outside
the natural world, and reduced that world to appearances or meanings;
and realism, which reduced the human subject to the status of one natural
object among others, and assumed the world was objectively determinate
and intelligible even outside the context of human action and enquiry.32
His preoccupations, as he said in a later interview, were about “how to give
man both his autonomy and his reality among real objects, avoiding ideal-
ism without lapsing into a mechanistic determinism.”33 Husserl gave him
a third way that would acknowledge both the radical interdependence of
subject and world and the distance between them. Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy allowed him to start with the basic phenomena of human experience.
Sartre explains in the introduction to Being and Nothingness that at
the heart of all human experience there is some form of conscience (“con-
sciousness”). Consciousness is always intentional, which means that it is
consciousness of something; it always posits a transcendent object (one
that is “outside” itself); it has no content (nothing “inside” it).34
The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from conscious-
ness and to re-establish its true connection with the world, to know that con-
sciousness is a positional consciousness of the world. All consciousness is posi-
tional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself
in this same positing. All that there is of intention in my actual consciousness is

31. For Husserl’s reception in France, see Dupont, “Receptions of Phenomenology in

French Philosophy and Religious Thought, 1889–1939.”
32. Michael Hammond, Jane Howarth, and Russell Keat, Understanding Phenomenology
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 97, give a helpful overview of the two “schools.”
33. Quoted in Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s
Philosophy, 3.
34. For Husserl’s development of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, see David Bell, Hus-
serl (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 3–28 and esp. 115.
34 = h u m a n b e i n g
directed toward the outside, toward the table; all my judgments or practical ac-
tivities, all my present inclinations transcend themselves; they aim at the table
and are absorbed in it.35

A first implication of intentionality is that “transcendence is the consti-

tutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness comes about
directed towards a being distinct from itself.”36 This “ontological proof ” is
Sartre’s rebuttal of idealism: he argues that consciousness implies and re-
quires the apprehension of things that are not constituted solely by that
very consciousness. Things are present to our consciousness and not
merely represented in it. Sartre wants to go beyond Berkeley’s dictum iden-
tifying the appearance of an object with its being (“Esse est percipi,” “To be
is to be perceived”) by showing that appearance to consciousness requires
what is beyond consciousness.37
A second implication of the directedness of intentional consciousness,
however, is that there is no need to suppose that consciousness is an in-
dependent substantial subject.38 There is certainly consciousness of some-
thing and there is “subjectivity itself ”—but no subject.39 Subjectivity does
not require the substantial being of any subject, it requires the not-being
of the subject, the recognition that what is known is other than oneself. As
Thomas Busch puts it: “All attempts to objectify this self create a realm of
discourse which does not contain subjectivity. The epistemological start-
ing point of Sartre’s existential philosophy is the irreducible subject/object
relationship.”40
In the immediacy of experience, the one who experiences does not in-
trude into that experience. Hazel Barnes, adapting a phrase used by Wil-
liam James, suggests that for Sartre “consciousness is not an entity but a
process of attention.”41 We are left simply with consciousness, which Sar-

35. BN xxvii–xxviii; EN 18/18.

36. BN xxxvii; EN 28/28.
37. Cited at BN xxvi; EN 16/16. See BN xxvi–xxxii; EN 16–23/16–23.
38. For a valuable survey of the vexing question of “the subject” in late twentieth-century
thought, see Christina Howells, “Conclusion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1992).
39. BN xxxiii; EN 23/24.
40. Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philoso-
phy, 7, commenting on TE.
41. Hazel E. Barnes, An Existentialist Ethics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 13.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 35

tre calls “a nonsubstantial absolute” [un absolu non substantial]: “absolute”

because rather than relating to human experience, it is this human experi-
ence; “nonsubstantial” because it is “total emptiness (since the entire world
is outside it).”42 If the starting point of philosophy is our conscious expe-
rience of something, then it makes no sense to speak of consciousness ex-
isting before an experience and receiving the effect subsequently “like wa-
ter which one stains.”43 “Since consciousness is not possible before being
[avant d’être: the temporal (not positional) sense of “before”], but since its
being is the source and condition of all possibility, its existence implies its
essence,”44 that is, there is no need to postulate another kind of precon-
scious essence of consciousness that would be outside its present existence.
Francis Jeanson nicely summarizes these two Sartrean implications about
being and about subjectivity: “One can affirm only that which is but which
the affirmant is not. Were there no being one would have nothing to affirm,
and, if one were himself being, one would be content merely to be, without
any affirmation.”45
This conclusion about the emptiness of consciousness can seem baf-
fling. It may help to trace the development of Sartre’s thinking in his ear-
lier work, particularly in The Transcendence of the Ego.46 There are certainly
significant differences between The Transcendence of the Ego and Being
and Nothingness. In his earlier essay Sartre is not concerned with the re-
flexivity of consciousness, with human subjectivity or with personhood.47
Yet there is a freshness and excitement about his insights into intentional-
ity here. Sartre expresses his admiration for Husserl’s phenomenological
programme, which allows the intentional objects of consciousness to be
studied as they are and avoids reducing questions about the world to ques-

42. BN xxxii; EN 23/23. 43. BN xxx; EN 21/21.

44. BN xxxi; EN 21/21–22.
45. Francis Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans. Robert V. Stone (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1980), 157. When so many philosophies try to explain the unique-
ness of human beings by adding vague properties onto the definition of what is it is to be hu-
man (such as “dignity” or “value” or “soul”), it is fascinating that Sartre chooses to take away
from our nature: we are less than what we seem to be, and this is why we can be conscious.
46. See the excellent Translators’ Introduction in Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of
the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpat-
rick (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 11–27.
47. For the differences, and for the development of Sartre’s thinking, see Leo Fretz, “Indi-
viduality in Sartre’s Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 67–84.
36 = h u m a n b e i n g

tions about the nature of thought or the thinker. Sartre believes, however,
that he has a significant disagreement to make. Husserl postulates a “tran-
scendental ego,” an “I” or subject that stands behind consciousness, mak-
ing it possible and unifying it. For Sartre and others this was a betrayal of
intentionality. It is an unnecessary return to idealism; it renders objects
and their characteristics dependent on the activity of the ego; and it calls
for some third reality to mediate between ego and world.
Instead, insists Sartre, consciousness is simply the sheer activity of tran-
scending toward objects. There are no intermediary mental entities within
consciousness or between it and the world. It is, as Thomas Busch puts it,
a category mistake to apply the mode of object relations and causality to
a transcendental consciousness that is an act rather than an object.48 All
content is on the side of the object,49 and even the things we know about
ourselves as subjects (in general or in particular), even “the psychic and
psycho-physical me [moi psychique et psycho-psychique],” are objects for
consciousness.50 This is why Sartre allows for a transcendent ego (which
can be an object of our awareness) but not a transcendental ego (which
would account for and determine the awareness itself). “The conscious-
ness which says ‘I think’ is precisely not the consciousness which thinks.”51
Therefore “the transcendental field becomes impersonal; or, if you like,
‘pre-personal,’ without an I [sans Je].”52 The unity of consciousness is given
by the unity and permanence of the transcendent object, whatever it is, not
by a unifying ego. A section from the conclusion of The Transcendence of
the Ego expresses this very clearly.

48. Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philoso-
phy, 9.
49. Kathleen Wider sees similarities between Sartre’s and Wittgenstein’s view of the self,
which is a limit for the world, a formal condition for its possibility. “For Wittgenstein you can
describe the world completely, give all the propositions of natural science, state all meaningful
propositions, and still there is something left over—a something that is nothing and so cannot
be spoken of but can be shown. What is left over is the metaphysical self.” See Kathleen Wider,
“A Nothing about Which Something Can Be Said: Sartre and Wittgenstein on the Self,” in Sartre
Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van den Hoven (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University
Press, 1991), 337. Wittgenstein writes: “This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out
from the world as unique, solipsism singles me out alone, and at last I see that I too belong with
the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, on the other side, as unique, the
world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Notebooks, 1914–1916, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 85e.
50. TE 36 [18]. 51. TE 45 [28].
52. TE 36 [19].
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 37
The Transcendental Field, purified of all egological structure, recovers its primary
transparency. In a sense, it is a nothing, since all physical, psycho-physical, and
psychic objects, all truths, all values are outside it; since my Me has itself ceased to
be any part of it. But this nothing is all since it is consciousness of all these objects.
There is no longer an “inner life” [.....] because there is no longer anything which
is an object and which can at the same time partake of the intimacy of conscious-
ness. Doubts, remorse, the so-called “mental crises of consciousness,” etc.—in
short, all the content of intimate diaries—become simple representations.53

Sartre’s attack on the transcendental ego has elicited contradictory

responses, as we have seen in the historical introduction to this present
work. Some defend Husserl and say that consciousness must have at least
some structures and modes of apprehension in order to shape the world
of experience54 and in order to individuate the subject who experiences
this subjectivity.55 Others argue that Sartre is actually faithful to Husserl’s
ideas if not to his terminology, and that he advances against Husserl what
was Husserl’s own position. For Husserl the transcendental “attitude” is
more a reflexive awareness of our unreflective subjective experience,56 and
the consciousness that constitutes this “transcendental ego” as an object is
never itself grasped, it has a kind of anonymity akin to Sartre’s imperson-
ality.57 Herbert Spiegelberg, in his great history of phenomenology, at the
same time as recording Sartre’s debt to Husserl and Heidegger, judges that
the most original feature of Sartre’s conception of consciousness is its es-
sential negativity.58 It is enough for us to see its place in Sartre’s own phe-
nomenology without deciding whether he was fair to Husserl or not.

Self-Consciousness and Being-for-Itself

Together with this transparent consciousness, however, there is always
some form of self-consciousness, and this is what concerned Sartre much

53. TE 93–94 [74–75].

54. Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980),
91–96.
55. Peter Caws, Sartre: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London, Boston, and Henley:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 52–60.
56. James M. Edie, “The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s Critique of Husserl,”
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24 (1993).
57. James M. Edie, “The Roots of the Existentialist Theory of Freedom in ‘Ideas I,’ ” Husserl
Studies 1 (1984).
58. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 502–5.
38 = h u m a n b e i n g

more by the time he wrote Being and Nothingness. Although we don’t

need to refer to any subject when we experience things, we are neverthe-
less unreflectively aware of our own experiencing (which makes us self-
conscious), and in addition we can be reflectively aware of a subject of
the experience. These distinctions are crucial. In order to be conscious of
something, there must be consciousness of the consciousness of this thing,
otherwise there would be “a consciousness ignorant of itself, an uncon-
scious consciousness—which is absurd.”59 In other words, in the moment
of awareness, we are aware that we are aware. But this does not require an
infinite regress of further consciousnesses, each one standing back from
the previous conscious awareness to affirm it. Instead, there must be “an
immediate, non-cognitive relation of the self to itself [de soi à soi].”60 This
is nonreflective (it is not the subject reflecting on his experience after the
event), and nonpositional (it is not the subject making itself into the object
of a new positional consciousness). It takes a kind of unformed, sideways
glance at the positional consciousness and makes it possible.61 This is a
more technical account of what has already been formulated in The Tran-
scendence of the Ego:
The type of existence of consciousness is to be consciousness of itself [conscience
de soi]. And consciousness is aware of itself in so far as it is consciousness of a
transcendent object. All is therefore clear and lucid in consciousness: the ob-
ject with its characteristic opacity is before consciousness, but consciousness
is purely and simply consciousness of being consciousness of that object [con-
science d’être conscience de cet objet]. This is the law of its existence.62

In Being and Nothingness Sartre calls this conscience (de) soi, “conscious-
ness (of) self ”63—putting the “of ” in parentheses to show that this “self ”
is not an explicit object of knowledge, nor merely an implicit condition of
consciousness, but rather the implicit consciousness that accompanies and
is one with any consciousness of an object. In English one is able to use
the word “self ” as a prefix and say “self-consciousness” which conveniently
lessens the danger of considering this “self ” to be an object. It may seem
that immediate self-awareness is revealed through reflection and a kind of
questioning introspection. However, “it is the non-reflective consciousness
59. BN xxviii; EN 18/18. 60. BN xxix; EN 19/19.
61. BN xxix; EN 19/19. 62. TE 40 [23–24].
63. BN xxx; EN 20/20.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 39

which makes the reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cogito which

is the condition of the Cartesian cogito.”64 The two are inseparable, neces-
sarily circling round each other. “Every conscious existence exists as con-
sciousness of existing.”65
The immediacy of experience, therefore, exists for a witness, “although
the witness for which consciousness exists is itself.”66 This is something
Sartre calls la présence à soi (“presence to self ”),67 where the self repre-
sents “an ideal distance within the immanence of the subject in relation to
itself.”68 The only alternative to this is some form of dualism. Francis Jean-
son expresses the dilemma well:
If my consciousness can grasp itself only by becoming distinct from itself, if I
cannot be conscious of myself without making myself double, then there must
be an irreducible duality between the “I” that I am as reflecting subject and the
“me” that I also am as the unreflecting subject who acts and lives.69

Self-consciousness, then, accompanies consciousness. Sartre arrives at this

conclusion by a process of elimination. He cannot allow that the conscious
subject is simply one with its intentional object, unaware of its own aware-
ness—this would destroy subjectivity and consciousness themselves. All
versions of realism have the same effect by assuming that the subject is
one object within the world of objects, and there is no way of introducing
distance and difference into consciousness in a world where everything is
immanent. Nor can he allow that the conscious subject is separate from
its intentional object—this would isolate the subject and trap it within it-
self. All versions of idealism face this impossibility of bridging the gap be-
tween subject and world; they become dualistic or monistic, depending
on whether they preserve the notion of world or not. So Sartre suggests
a third way: there must be a difference within a unity; a distance that is
empty; a self that is not itself. These are not paradoxes intended to under-
mine rational thinking, like the koan of a Zen master (“What is the sound
of one hand clapping?”)—they are attempts to describe something (con-
sciousness) that simply cannot be described in the categories of object and
identity.

64. BN xxix; EN 19/20. 65. BN xxx; EN 20/20.

66. BN 74; EN 111/117. 67. BN 77; EN 113/120.
68. BN 77; EN 113/119.
69. Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, 114.
40 = h u m a n b e i n g
The being of consciousness as consciousness is to exist at a distance from self as
a presence to self [à distance de soi comme présence à soi], and this empty dis-
tance which being carries in its being is Nothingness [et cette distance nulle que
l’être porte dans son être, c’est le Néant].70

So these are the two senses in which negation exists in the heart of
human beings. First, there is no subject of experience, there is just con-
sciousness of something. This is open, transparent, empty. Second, even
though we are conscious (of) being conscious, in an implicit way, we can
never know or identify with the one who is conscious; we are immediately
present to ourselves and our experience, and at the same time immediately
withdrawn from them. Without reflection, our attention is directed out-
ward, to objects, away from ourselves, with an implicit awareness of our-
selves as conscious subjects; in reflection, our attention is directed to the
process of attention, which thus becomes an object.
As conscious beings we are fractured, without a stable identity, distant
from ourselves, and this inner negation allows us to be conscious and to
act. What then remains? One could argue that in Sartre’s account there is
nothing left of the subject at all, there is just the world-as-experienced. We
are so identified with the world that no comments or criticisms are possi-
ble. There is no human experience. Being and Nothingness, however, has a
rich understanding of the human subject, which is constituted in the pro-
cess of going beyond and reinterpreting the self to which we are present.
This brings us to concept of l’être-pour-soi, being-for-itself.71
The key to Sartre’s understanding is his contention that there is an iden-
tity that is denied.72 This is quite different from saying that there is no hu-
man identity. We have seen how Sartre pays full attention to the numer-
ous aspects of each human life which make up an individual identity, the
extensive catalogue of answers we could give to the question “Who am I?”
But he insists that no aspect of our identity can exist as ours unless we have
some distance from it. Affirmation always involves taking a point of view
on what is affirmed. Sartre was delighted to discover Heidegger’s descrip-

70. BN 78; EN 114/120.

71. The language is Hegelian (being-for-itself, being-in-itself), but I will not go into the
Hegelian background since Sartre uses these phrases for his own purposes which will become
apparent from the texts I examine.
72. BN 178; EN 214/227.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 41

tion of the human being as a “creature of distances.”73 At the same time,

this “distance” must not create a separation from my identity that would
turn it into someone else’s. Therefore there is a negation of identity that
takes place within that very identity. “An impalpable fissure has slipped
into being.”74 There is never a “coincidence” between what we are and our
consciousness of this.75 “Thus in order for a self [un soi] to exist, it is nec-
essary that the unity of this being include its own nothingness as the nihi-
lation of what is identical [comporte son propre néant comme néantisation
de l’identique].”76 It shouldn’t surprise us that Sartre’s language is strained
here: the peculiar type of reflection involved in self-consciousness cannot
be described in the terms we use for things in their objectivity and self-
subsistence. Just as intentionality was a way for Husserl to conceive of a
quite distinct mode of being (i.e., “relation”), so Sartre needed to conceive
of a distinct mode of being, not “a unity that contains a duality” but “a du-
ality that is unity.”77
No human being can exist without an identity, without a great list of
experiences, characteristics, and convictions. These make up our être-en-
soi, our “being-in-itself ”—everything about us that is given.78 At the same
time, no human being can exist who is solely a given identity. Without
some inner fragmentation, some presence to self, some nihilation of iden-
tity, there can be no human identity, since what makes us human is the
fact that we can recognize, confirm, question, adapt, and surpass this very
identity. We are être-pour-soi, “being-for-itself,” insofar as we view and re-
spond to the identity of our being-in-itself. Sartre highlights the disloca-
tion implicit in any recognition of oneself.79
For Sartre the word soi, “self,” is reflexive. It indicates a relation be-
tween the subject and itself, and it can be neither a “real” identity (an ob-

73. See Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, 133.

74. BN 77; EN 113/120. 75. BN 74; EN 110/116.
76. BN 78; EN 114/120. 77. BN 76; EN 112/118.
78. Strictly speaking, we never encounter pure being-in-itself, instead we meet being-in-
itself in “the world” as it is understood in the light of our purposes; see chapter 3.
79. In the same period Lacan was warning of the dangers of identifying with the image we
have of ourselves (because this struggle to associate with this “other” self must involve alien-
ation). See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977),
chapter 1, on the mirror stage. The earliest version of this essay was first given as a paper in
1936. For comments on some connections between Lacan and Sartre, see Howells, “Conclu-
sion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” 328–31.
42 = h u m a n b e i n g

jective, established, fully formed self) nor a detached, disembodied, alter-

native substance that takes a point of view on one’s identity. The presence
of the for-itself to the in-itself, to use Sartre’s pregnant phrase, is “pure
denied identity [pure identité niée].”80 Another long citation summarizes
these arguments:
In fact the self [le soi] cannot be apprehended as a real existent; the subject can
not be self [le sujet ne peut être soi], for coincidence with self, as we have seen,
causes the self to disappear. But neither can it not be self since the self is an indi-
cation of the subject itself. The self therefore represents an ideal distance within
the immanence of the subject in relation to itself, a way of not being its own co-
incidence, of escaping identity while positing it as unity—in short, of being in
a perpetually unstable equilibrium between identity as absolute cohesion with-
out a trace of diversity and unity as a synthesis of a multiplicity. This is what we
shall call presence to self [présence à soi]. The law of being of the for-itself, as the
ontological foundation of consciousness, is to be itself in the form of presence
to self.81

“Presence” here is the very thing that saves the human being from an ossi-
fied identity, and is therefore quite different from that metaphysical “pres-
ence” attacked by Derrida, a presence that he thought reduced us to be-
ing one “being” among other beings.82 Sartre’s presence to self destabilizes
and decenters the subject since it places us perpetually at one remove from
who we are, without creating an alternative center of stability.
One question arises: Why is Sartre’s language so absolute and so neg-
ative? Is this an example of what Peter Caws has called “that peculiar
taste for philosophical melodrama which has so alienated sceptical An-
glo-Saxons from their excitable Continental colleagues,”83 which incited
A. J. Ayer famously to accuse Sartre of trickery and nonsense as early as
1945?84 Would it not be possible to use more nuanced verbs to describe
this distance from our identity? Instead of an identity being denied and
fragmented and nihilated, why could it not be qualified or limited or put

80. BN 178; EN 214/227.

81. BN 76–77; EN 113/119.
82. See Christina Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 196–98.
83. Caws, Sartre, 66.
84. A. J. Ayer, “Novelist-Philosophers: V. Jean-Paul Sartre,” Horizon 12 (1945).
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 43

in context or transcended or even completed or perfected? One answer is

that Sartre would indeed approve of these terms, and uses similar ones.
His negation is nuanced. Sartre has a fondness for the verb dépasser, “to
surpass”: we have seen how one’s identity as a reformed gambler, one’s past
resolution, is “surpassed by the very fact that I am conscious of it.”85 This
word is the French equivalent of Hegel’s aufheben, which carries the three-
fold connotation of transcending, negating, and preserving.86 Even if Sar-
tre gives the word connotations of his own, and avoids a Hegelian philoso-
phy of recuperation,87 his choice of language shows that the activity of the
for-itself is not wholly negative. In a similar way Sartre writes that when
we question the world and hold it at a distance we do not alter the being of
the world, so this sense of negation carries with it no connotation of inter-
ference or destruction. “It is not given to human reality to annihilate, even
provisionally, the mass of being which it posits before itself. What it can
modify is its relation to this being.”88
However, despite this positive angle, Sartre argues again and again that
in order for there to be any consciousness of identity, any qualification of
this identity, any response to it—the denial must be unqualified, the dis-
tance absolute. There is no such thing as a partial consciousness of our-
selves. It may be hazy, we may be confused, but if something is present to
consciousness, then there must be an absolute distinction and distance be-
tween the object of consciousness and the subject “who is” conscious—this
is the original distinction contained in the notion of intentionality. Being-
for-itself is not being-in-itself. To be conscious of something is to negate it,
to deny that one is identical with it.89 Negation is unavoidable.

Imagination and the Power of Negation

So far the discussion has been largely negative: We are not this identity, we
are not this self. We are constituted by nothingness, by a negation in the
heart of our being. We don’t just lack external things, we lack ourselves.

85. BN 33; EN 68/70.

86. See R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philoso-
phy, 1950–1960 (London: Tavistock, 1964), 13–14.
87. Cf. the comments on Hegel and Derrida in Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom,
199–200.
88. BN 24; EN 59/61.
89. BN 123; EN 158/167.
44 = h u m a n b e i n g

Sartre’s philosophy might seem to encourage a total deconstruction of the

human being. Yet there is a constructive moment too, which is in fact in-
separable from the negative one. This lack of identification with ourselves,
this inner fragmentation, is the very thing that allows us to go beyond what
we are and reach toward what we could be. It is only by recognizing what
is not that we recognize what could be. We don’t just deny ourselves, we
surpass ourselves and make a choice about which self will be established
in this movement. Negation frees us from the deterministic structures of
being and makes room for freedom, possibility, imagination, creativity,
and choice. It is only in prereflective self-consciousness that negation has
a foundation, an origin. Any surpassing, any negation within the world
must come from a being whose very nature is to surpass its own being. We
can now look at how this positive aspect of freedom arises from negation.
Sartre is fascinated by negation. Mary Warnock has written that “it is im-
possible to exaggerate the importance which Sartre attaches to the power of
denial, of negation, of asserting not only what is but what is not the case.”90
We have met a number of examples: someone cannot identify fully with his
former resolution not to gamble; we cannot be sure how we will act on the
cliff. As well as these instances arising from human activity, Sartre finds ne-
gation in the simplest realities such as distance, absence, change, otherness,
repulsion, regret, and distraction, all of which “in their inner structure are
inhabited by negation, as by a necessary condition of their existence.”91 Sar-
tre calls them négatités.92
Negation reveals a peculiar twofold power that human beings have,
which is first to conceive of what is not and then to compare what is with
what is not. We do this so often we hardly notice. Sartre wonders where
these negative conceptions come from. Two things strike him with great
force. First, negation reveals something about the world, it lies in the heart
of reality. These négatités are not just imposed on the world by our language
or psychology, they tell us something essential about the world, and with-
out them we could not even begin to understand and act. Second, abso-
lutely nothing in the world as it is in itself, as l’être-en-soi, can account for
this process of negation. In itself the world is dense with positive informa-
90. From her introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1972), xvi.
91. BN 21; EN 56/57.
92. See BN 21, translator’s footnote 13.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 45

tion; every sensation, every event, every encounter, reveals its own fullness.
What, then, enables us to go beyond the purity and plenitude of our present
experience and wonder what it is not? Sartre concludes that negation must
come from ourselves: we reveal the negation that lies hidden in things. He
associates the power to negate with our imagination, and he locates the
source of that power in the negative structure of our consciousness.
It would be impossible to summarize Sartre’s thinking about negation
in a few pages—the relevant passages of Being and Nothingness contain
some of his most complex ideas.93 It will be enough to highlight one im-
portant observation that has already been made: human beings are able
to conceive of what is not. This kind of conceiving, like so many things, is
more puzzling than we usually think. It requires an ability to detach our-
selves from what is and to think of something else as not existing. This is
implied in the simplest act of questioning.94 If we are simply caught up in
a stream of positive experiences, in a constant flow of positive informa-
tion telling us about the world, then how could we even ask a question? We
could do no more than affirm and acknowledge.
If we question, then we are not sure of the answer.95 Ignorance by it-
self is not an interesting phenomenon—it is knowledge of our ignorance
that provokes Sartre. This knowledge, this doubt, presupposes that we have
some kind of awareness that the world could surprise us. If we doubt, then
we must have some kind of expectation that the world could turn out to be
different from what we expect it to be.96 This everyday presupposition is of
huge significance since it means that we are often withdrawing from the
fullness of what is given to us and relating it to what is not. “It is important
therefore that the questioner have the permanent possibility of dissociat-
ing himself from the causal series which constitutes being and which can
93. Esp. BN part 1, 3–70; EN 37–106/37–111.
94. See esp. BN 21–25; EN 56–60/58–62.
95. Sartre’s analysis of interrogation is similar to Heidegger’s in Sein und Zeit, but Sartre is
more concerned with the possibility of a negative answer and the implications of this for the
relation of human beings to what is not. See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement,
505–6.
96. Sartre notes here his debt to Descartes (BN 25; EN 60/62) and acknowledges it more
fully in Jean-Paul Sartre, “Cartesian Freedom,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York:
Collier Books, 1962), 190, where he writes that Cartesian doubt implies the “power of escaping,
disengaging oneself and withdrawing.” It is “a breaking of contact with being,” man’s “perma-
nent possibility of disentangling himself from the existing universe,” and “the most magnifi-
cent affirmation of the reign of the human.”
46 = h u m a n b e i n g

produce only being.”97 A negative reply tears us away from a wall of posi-
tivity that surrounds us, it is “an abrupt break in continuity which can not
in any case result from prior affirmations.”98 Notice that Sartre’s argument
does not assume that the answer to a question will be without explanation.
The answer may be a brute scientific fact with a perfectly comprehensible
network of causes—“There is no milk in the fridge”; “It’s three o’clock in
the morning.” What confirms our withdrawal from the causal series is the
knowledge of our ignorance. The simplest question, the smallest doubt,
shows that the totality of our experience is not enough and forces us to re-
late that experience with what is not.
Being can generate only being and if human beings [l’homme] are enclosed in
this process of generation, only being will come out of them. If we are to assume
that human beings are able to question this process—i.e., to make it the object
of interrogation—they must be able to hold it up to view as a totality, i.e., to put
themselves outside of being [en dehors de l’être].99

Questioning is one form of human behavior that reveals negation. An-

other is the power of imagination, which is a key term for Sartre.100 In his
language une image, an “image,” is not just one type of mental perception,
a “concrete and positive psychic fact,”101 that somehow we subsequently
judge to be unreal. Instead, it is of the nature of an image that it is not part
of what we perceive, and that the object it refers to does not exist or is not
here. We can see how this relates to the negation involved in questioning.
To question is to allow for the possibility of a world beyond the fullness of
what we experience in the present; to imagine is to conceive of something
concrete that is not contained in the fullness of our present experience.
The imagination is the very way that we refer to what is not.
The image must enclose in its very structure a nihilating thesis. It constitutes it-
self qua image while positing its object as existing elsewhere or not existing. It
carries within it a double negation; first it is the nihilation [néantisation] of the
world (since the world is not offering the imagined object as an present object

97. BN 23; EN 58/59. 98. BN 11; EN 45–46/46.

99. BN 24; EN 59/60–61.
100. Although by the time of BN Sartre prefers the term “consciousness” to “imagination.”
Cf. IM 216 [358], where he writes that imagination “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes
its freedom” (“c’est la conscience tout entière en tant qu’elle réalise sa liberté”).
101. BN 26; EN 61/62.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 47
of perception), secondly the nihilation of the object of the image (it is posited as
not present).102

Sartre’s explanations are very compact in Being and Nothingness, partly

because he assumes that readers will be familiar with his earlier work on
the subject in L’Imaginaire. In this work Sartre develops at greater length
the fundamental distinction between objects as perceived and as imag-
ined. Perception for Sartre does not just mean sensory perception; it em-
braces anything given within our experience, and could include feelings,
fears, memories, etc., if they arise as positive facts within experience. Per-
ception posits its objects as existing; the imagination posits its objects as
absent or not existent. “This act of positing—and this is essential—is not
superimposed on the image after it has been constituted. It is constitutive
of the consciousness of the image.”103
The characteristic of the intentional object of imaginative consciousness is that
the object is not present and is posited as such, or that it does not exist and is
posited as not existing, or that it is not posited at all.104

In order to see the picture as a picture of Peter, it is not enough just to look
at the picture as it is; I have to imagine Peter as absent and allow the pic-
ture to become the means by which Peter appears to me as absent.105
Sartre’s persistent concern is to undermine theories that suffer from
the illusion of immanence.106 In these theories our relationship with the
world would be completely determined by the positive facts of what we
experience, by our perceptions; our consciousness would be passive and
“completely absorbed in its intuitions of the real,”107 “engulfed in the real,”
“enmired in the world.”108 If everything were immanent there would be no
way of accounting for the numerous ways in which we judge something
to be absent, relate something to what it is not, question something about
what it could be, and act for a future that does not yet exist. The imagina-
tion is this extraordinary human capacity to deal with what is not.109
102. BN 26; EN 61/63. 103. IM 12 [32].
104. IM 13 [34]. 105. IM 25 [54].
106. IM 12 [32]. 107. IM 208 [344].
108. IM 213 [353].
109. It is a philosophical concept, but Sartre’s attraction to this concept undoubtedly re-
flected as well the instincts of his own heart as a writer. As Ronald Hayman has written: “Like
Kafka, he never felt more free than when he was writing, creating an imaginary space. Paper as
magic carpet; pen as wand”; see Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, 7.
48 = h u m a n b e i n g

Lack, Possibility, and the Projection of Values

With this understanding of negation in mind we can now return to the
second theme introduced at the beginning of the chapter, that of the objec-
tive demands met in any given circumstances. It was suggested that nor-
mally when we explain an agent’s actions we point to the agent’s personal
identity or to the objective demands met in a given situation. These de-
mands, which Sartre calls values, seem to arise from the circumstances in
which someone acts: a baby is hungry and needs feeding, a window is dirty
and needs cleaning. Sartre’s contention is simply put: We never discover
any objective values simply by observing the world. It is the nature of any
value that it is more than anything that can be discovered through objec-
tive observation. Values only exist because of our creative ability to see be-
yond the objective world and imagine a larger one.
Our actions are certainly motivated by our values. “A value” is taken here
in the broad sense of “something worthwhile that we wish to achieve.” We
boil the pasta because it is not yet cooked; we teach the children because
they do not yet understand. Whenever we act for a value we are acknowl-
edging that something is not what it should be (an evaluative judgment),
and this implies a prior acknowledgment that it is not what it could be (an
empirical judgment). The idea that “this needs doing” presupposes the idea
that “this could be what it is not.” In other words, we cannot recognize values
unless we have the ability to relate something that exists in the world with
something that does not. This is the field of le manqué (“lack”). It seems un-
remarkable, until we remember that most of our thinking assumes that val-
ues exist in things as they are in themselves. A tire is flat and needs inflating;
a visitor is late and needs to hurry up. This ordinary language provides a use-
ful shorthand, but it disguises a subtle process of reasoning. We think that
these adjectives (flat, late) are purely descriptive and that the situation so de-
scribed necessarily calls for a certain response (inflation, speed). But in the
common way they are used here, these adjectives contain both a description
of fact and a judgment about the relation of this fact to what could be. On its
own the tire is simply this irregular shape, and we only use the word “flat”
to express its relation with another state that could be (“inflated”), a state we
would like to bring about. In objective terms, the visitor will arrive at a cer-
tain time, and we only use the word “late” to express the relation between
this time and the time we expected, a time that could have been.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 49

We speak as if we are referring to objective demands and values found

in the world, and we fail to notice the active role we take in constituting
these values, the surreptitious move we make from fact to need. In point-
ing this out Sartre is not adopting an antirealist position. There is a real
relation between what is and what could be, or between what is and what
could have been: the tire really is flat and the visitor really is late. Sartre is
merely highlighting the fact that these kinds of descriptions always require
us to envisage an alternative reality and set the present situation against it.
We have to compare what is happening with an alternative situation that
could happen and then make a judgment that this alternative should hap-
pen. Our values always depend on the alternative realities we project. They
are real, yet we have to create a context in which this reality can be ac-
knowledged.
Lack cannot be found in what Sartre calls l’être-en-soi, in “being-in-
itself.” There is no lack in things as they are in themselves, as they are in their
immediacy and objectivity, as they are outside the contexts given by human
meanings and interpretations.110 Sartre proposes an elegant schema:
Lack does not belong to the nature of the in-itself, which is all positivity. It ap-
pears in the world only with the upsurge of human reality. It is only in the hu-
man world that there can be lacks. A lack presupposes a trinity: that which is
missing or “the lacking” [manquant], that which misses what is lacking or “the
existing” [existant], and a totality which has been broken by the lacking and
which would be restored by the synthesis of “the lacking” and “the existing”—
that is “the lacked” [le manqué]. The being which is released to the intuition of
human reality is always that to which some thing is lacking—i.e., the existing.111

In themselves, the things we perceive are complete (“all positivity”)—they

are what they are. Yet we register them as being incomplete, we compare
them with an ideal—they are not what they could be. Only in this way
are we led to the meaning (le sens) of what exists.112 At first sight this is
no more than a very general point about the human process of judgment
and predication. Sartre’s first examples of lack, therefore, are not especially
to do with value or activity, they simply illustrate the way we understand

110. Cf. BN Introduction, section 6, xxxviii–xliii; EN 29–33/30–34. This summary account

of l’être-en-soi will be elaborated later in chapter 3 below.
111. BN 86; EN 122/129.
112. BN 86; EN 123/130.
50 = h u m a n b e i n g

one thing (“the existing”) in terms of its relation to what it could be (“the
synthesis,” “the lacked”). We understand this bright crescent in the sky as
the moon because we relate it to our idea of the full moon; we can say that
the Venus de Milo statue is broken only because we relate it to a complete
statue of a human figure that includes both arms; we think our friend is a
coward only because we have some conception of the courage we believe
she could have. Judgments about value, however, also depend on the com-
parisons we make—comparisons that require us to go beyond the world as
it is given to us, as we find it. The value we seek, the new thing desired (the
“desideratum”), is indeed “an objective lack,”113 it is not some subjective
fancy imposed on a world unable to accept it; yet it is not present in the
world—it is the world insofar as the world is not what it could be.
Sartre gives some examples. The emperor Constantine wants to build
a new Rome in the eastern part of his empire.114 Why? Because in the old
Rome the taxes are collected badly, the city is insecure from invasions, its
position as a Mediterranean capital is impractical, and its morals are cor-
rupt. All these considerations are negative, they are value judgments about
what is lacking in the city with respect to an ideal city. Not one observable
fact forces Constantine to envisage this ideal, since “the most miserable
situation can by itself be designated only as it is, without any reference to
an ideal nothingness.”115 In itself Rome just has this position, this security,
these morals—no more. It is the dreams of the emperor that help him see
what is lacking in his city.
Sartre jumps from this example of a Roman emperor to that of a nine-
teenth-century French worker. Why does a certain worker not rise up in
protest against his oppressive working conditions? One reason, Sartre
says, is because his misfortunes seem natural, they seem to be an inevi-
table part of his condition and of his being. Suffering is not a demand that
calls to him and motivates him, it just is. “He suffers without considering
his suffering and without conferring value on it. To suffer and to be are one
and the same for him.”116 Consciousness of suffering as intolerable does
not emerge from the situation as he finds it, it only comes if he can con-
template it in relation to an ideal. This is the heart of Sartre’s inversion of
our commonsense view of values as things that exist plainly in the world.

113. BN 433; EN 478/508. 114. BN 433–34; EN 477–78/508–9.

115. BN 434; EN 478/509. 116. BN 435; EN 479/510.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 51

Suffering cannot be a motivation for the worker’s acts because it is only

“when he has formed the project of changing the situation that it will ap-
pear intolerable to him.”117
Once again, Sartre is not taking an antirealist position. He is not pre-
tending that suffering does not exist until it is noticed, he is arguing that
it has no practical significance, no regulative function, until it is compared
with an ideal. This is true no matter how deeply held and universal the
values are thought to be. Racism, infanticide, rape, genocide: a society
condemns these only if it can generate ideals against which they are seen
to be wanting. This does not take away the objectivity of value, it merely
shows—as we shall see more clearly in chapter 3—that objectivity is itself
dependent on the human projection of ideals. No factual state by itself can
motivate any act whatsoever.118 ‘The motivation is understood only by the
end; that is, by the non-existent.”119 It is worth citing an extended passage
here:
In so far as human beings are immersed in their historical situation, they do not
even succeed in conceiving of the failures and lacks in a political organization
or determined economy; this is not, as is stupidly said, because they are “accus-
tomed to it,” but because they apprehend it in its plenitude of being and because
they can not even imagine that they can exist in it otherwise. For it is necessary
here to reverse common opinion and on the basis of what is not to acknowledge
the harshness of a situation or the sufferings which it imposes, both of which
are motives for conceiving of another state of affairs in which things would be
better for everybody. It is on the day that we can conceive of a different state of
affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide
that these are unbearable.120

Normally, we take certain values for granted and they have an unques-
tioned urgency. The momentum of our action confirms their relevance,
117. BN 435; EN 479/510.
118. Olafson suggests that Sartre has much in common here with G. E. Moore, who used
his “open question” argument against all forms of ethical naturalism. According to Moore, no
matter what “natural” properties a thing or situation may have, this leaves open the question
of whether it is good, whether it is valuable. He believed, however, that there are “nonnatural”
properties that settle evaluative questions. Sartre pushes the open question argument further
and shows that no property could possibly determine by itself the value of any thing or situa-
tion. See Olafson, Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism, 126–27.
119. BN 437; EN 481/512. See chapter 5 for a proper discussion of motive and motivation.
120. BN 434–35; EN 478–79/509–10.
52 = h u m a n b e i n g

and our “acts cause values to spring up like partridges.”121 In the settled
world of the bourgeois, for example, a pattern of respectable behavior re-
inforces both one’s identity as bourgeois and the bourgeois values them-
selves. “Values are sown on my path as thousands of little real demands,
like signs which order us to keep off the grass.”122 Then we may realize that
these values have no foundation in the immediate being of the world, there
is nothing necessary about them. This is another instance of anguish. We
have to bring the values to light by envisaging an alternative world. “It fol-
lows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing,
absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular scale of
values.”123 Lack, possibility, and value are all forms of negation that de-
pend on the fundamental negation within consciousness. “The condition
on which human reality can deny all or part of the world is that human re-
ality carry nothingness within itself as the nothing which separates its pres-
ent from all its past.”124
We can return to some of the examples already given. How can the an-
guished cliff walker both desire to be safe in the future and fear that he could
renounce this desire? Because “I am the one which I will be, in the mode of
not being it.”125 Why can’t the reformed gambler cling onto his resolution
definitively? Because “by the very fact of taking my position in existence as
consciousness of being, I make myself not to be the past of good resolutions
which I am [je me fais n’être pas ce passé de bonnes résolutions que je suis].”126
Consciousness confronts its past and its future as “facing a self which it is
in the mode of not-being.”127 The project of sincerity depends on an aware-
ness within our consciousness that we are not who we are, that is, that we
want to embrace an identity even while claiming that it already constitutes
us.128 The worker conscious of his oppression is able to take a new view on
his sufferings. “This implies for consciousness the permanent possibility of
effecting a rupture with its own past, of wrenching itself away from its own
past so as to be able to consider it in the light of a non-being.”129 In all these
ways, action implies negation, and negation depends on an inner fragmen-
tation, a lack of identity, a nothingness, within the human being.

121. BN 38; EN 73/76. 122. BN 38; EN 73–74/76.

123. BN 38; EN 73/76. 124. BN 28; EN 63/65.
125. BN 32; EN 67/69. 126. BN 33; EN 68/71.
127. BN 34; EN 69/72. 128. BN 67; EN 102/108.
129. BN 436; EN 480/511.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 53

We are able to hold any enterprise at a distance and question the values
we have been pursuing. In that moment of reflection we realize that there
is no necessity built into the world that requires us to get out of bed when
the alarm rings or do what the boss orders or finish the book we are writ-
ing or even feed the starving baby. Some values may seem to have a greater
immediacy or a more primal connection with our instinctive needs and
biological nature (to eat, to talk, to love .....), but all of them, if we reflect on
them, can be questioned and then affirmed or denied.
Sartre is not promoting lethargy, or moral anarchy, he is merely draw-
ing attention to the human foundation of value. We are not enslaved to the
values of the world, rather we are free to release them. To deny this is to
be sérieux (“serious”), a technical word that Sartre applies to anyone who
resides “in the reassuring, materialistic substantiation of values” (dans la
substantification rassurante et chosiste des valeurs) and pushes aside “a pri-
ori as impossible all enterprises in which [the person is] not engaged at the
moment.”130 There will be much more to say in chapter 3 about how values
are still objective, still real, but our concern here is just to appreciate the
part we play in establishing values, the anguish we feel when we discover
this, and the responsibility this calls us to.

The Self, Selfness, and Personhood

Human identity evolves. We have examined in this chapter the three stages
of that evolution. They are distinct but intertwined. First, we recognize and
accept the numerous factors that do make up our individual identity. This
is the prereflective work of consciousness as we open ourselves to all that is
and to all that we are. Second, we realize with anguish that this identity is
precarious and cannot provide sufficient grounds for our forthcoming ac-
tions and for our unfolding identity. This is the result of consciousness re-
flecting on itself and appreciating its own insufficiency. Third, we have to
determine for ourselves what our identity shall become by freely choosing
to live and act for certain values. These values do not arise with any neces-
sity from ourselves or from the world, they are chosen and projected by
being-for-itself.
To put it very simply: Human beings have to move forward. We may
be paralyzed momentarily by anguish and self-doubt. We may not be sure

130. BN 39; EN 74–75/77.

54 = h u m a n b e i n g

what to do or how to do it or why to do anything at all. But we must act,

somehow, and our action as intentional must be for something. So as soon
as we do act, we become a human being who values this end, we establish
our identity as someone whose life is oriented to this goal. The identity
that is reconstituted at each moment by this free adoption of values draws
attention to a distinctive aspect of the human being. What is most signifi-
cant is the self as projected and not as possessed; this is an identity we de-
termine through action and not an identity that determines action. Sartre
calls this selfness or personhood. We won’t discover until chapter 5 exactly
why a person’s identity develops in the particular way it does, but we can
finish this first chapter by looking briefly at the structure of personhood.
We have seen how everything human beings experience can be held at
a distance because our very being is to exist at a distance from itself. There
is a sense of bewilderment, but this traumatic fragmentation at the heart
of the self is what allows us to be as human beings. We are being-for-itself
as well as being-in-itself. We can always reflect on ourselves, and break
the momentum that a certain activity may have generated previously. We
have to keep moving forward and living for a freely chosen conception of
the self, as if we had this identity. The identity for which we act is no lon-
ger a fixed foundation for our activity, it is the meaning we give to our life,
freely chosen from all the possible meanings that reflection reveals to us.
This identity is a future goal we are trying to achieve rather than a fixed self
that we are; it is the evolving orientation of our life rather than its fixed es-
sence. We cannot fully identify with anything in our past, and nothing in
the present gives us our bearings, yet we cannot avoid setting before us an
image of who we want to be. To reconstitute the self by seeking a self gives
us selfness. To choose an identity and make this identity the goal of our
actions makes us a person. This relationship we establish with a possible
identity is what gives us personal identity. So we are much more than the
passive presence-to-self of consciousness.
Sartre explains this in a short, crucial section of Being and Nothingness
called “Le moi et le circuit de l’ipséité.” 131 The language of “person” has en-
tered Sartre’s vocabulary by the time of Being and Nothingness. In the years
since The Transcendence of the Ego he has become interested in how we re-
establish identity and not only in the denial of that identity. His purposes
131. BN 102–5; EN 139–41/147–49.
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 55

are also more constructive and less polemical.132 There are two reflective
movements that make us persons. The first we have already dealt with at
great length: it is the presence to self of consciousness. In itself the ego (the
“me,” le moi; the “self,” le soi) is not the conscious subject but an object that
we are conscious of. As we have seen, nothing will constitute our identity
unless we are conscious of it. Personal existence is conferred partly by this
presence to ourselves, to the ego and all that we are. The second reflective
movement that makes us persons Sartre calls ipséité,133 for which Hazel
Barnes substitutes the term “selfness.” In selfness we become present not
only to the identity that we are, but also to the identity that we could be.
We understand ourselves in relation to a future identity that cannot be ad-
equately derived from or determined by who we are now. Our being is to
be present to what it is (through consciousness) and present-yet-absent to
what we could be but are not yet (through selfness). Just as consciousness
in the very structure of its being refers to an identity it denies, it also refers
to a possible future identity.
The for-itself is “self ” over there [Le pour-soi est soi là-bas], beyond its grasp,
in the far reaches of its possibilities. This free necessity of being—over there—
what one is in the form of lack is what constitutes selfness [l’ipséité] or the sec-
ond essential aspect of the person. In fact how can the person be defined if not
as a free relation to oneself [à soi]?134

Sartre’s study of consciousness and being-for-itself has so far been an

analysis of “instantaneity,” of what is contained in a single moment of con-
sciousness. But now being-for-itself “under our observation, has been
transcended toward value and possibilities,” which is only possible “within
a temporal surpassing.”135 This movement forward creates a “circuit of self-

132. Cf. the language about the impersonal and the prepersonal at TE 36 [19]. For an ac-
count of the shift in language from TE to BN, see Fretz, “Individuality in Sartre’s Philosophy,”
esp 77–83; and Rhiannon Goldthorpe, “Sartre and the Self: Discontinuity or Continuity?”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1996): 525–30. Sartre was influenced by
his own experiences (an increasing engagement with the world brought about by the war) and
by reading Gide (where a disintegration of the self is offset by its recovery through writing, cre-
ativity, and spontaneity).
133. L’ipséité is the translation of Heidegger’s Selbstheit, a neologism Sartre attributes to
Heidegger’s French translator M. Corbin. See Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existen-
tialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 12 (endnote 27) and cf. BN 17; EN 52/53.
134. BN 103–4; EN 140/148. 135. BN 104; EN 141/149.
56 = h u m a n b e i n g

ness” (circuit de l’ipséité’)136 in which the world is understood in terms of

our projects and our projects understood in terms of the world.137 As well
as consciousness of self, there is a “project toward self ” that constitutes
selfness.138
There are therefore two inseparable aspects to a human life: first, the
life we possess in the present, the identity of which we are conscious; sec-
ond, the life that unfolds through our activity, through the relationship be-
tween our present and our future. This second dynamic aspect initiates a
“feedback” effect, since our present consciousness of our present identity
(and the values we hold) partly depends on the goals we are striving to-
ward. “My possible [mon possible, the future I freely choose] is reflected
on my consciousness and determines it as what it is.”139 This is selfness,
personhood. It is not an inner, static being that determines who we are
and what we do; it is a unified, dynamic process in which our life is given
meaning and purpose through a relationship with a specific and freely
chosen future, and in which a future is simultaneously brought about by
an action that gives orientation to our whole life. We create it and take re-
sponsibility for it, just as in Aristotle we take responsibility for our charac-
ter by freely choosing to act in accordance with a certain image of virtue or
vice: “[W]e become just by doing just actions.”140
If we are conscious, then we are present to what is present. Then as per-
sons having selfness we are present to what is absent—to what we decide
is possible in the future—and this second presence is what defines us. We
strive after a future self (soi) that never arrives because we always lack this
identity. What is realized, however, “is a for-itself which is designated by
the future and which is constituted in connection with this future.”141 This
being-for-itself is the structuring of a whole life as it unfolds in time—a dy-
namic unity much greater than the static being of things in themselves.142

136. BN 102 and 198; EN 139/147 and 234/248.

137. BN 198–203; EN 234–40/248–54. 138. BN 198; EN 234/248.
139. BN 103; EN 140/148.
140. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett,
1985), Bk2, 1103b1. For the relation between being-for-itself and Aristotelian “character,” see
Qizilbash, “Aristotle and Sartre on the Human Condition: Lack, Responsibility and the Desire
to Be God,” 31–32.
141. BN 128; EN 163/172.
142. This coherence of actions which comes from the future project is akin to Aristot-
le’s notion of final cause: the end makes sense of the activity. See Phyllis Sutton Morris, “Self-
 i d e n t i t y i n s a r t r e = 57

Sartre writes that we are like an ass pulling a cart and chasing a carrot that
hangs from a stick attached to the cart:143 our very movement causes the
carrot (our goal) to draw us forward, which confirms the momentum cre-
ated by the cart (our identity), and which makes it impossible that we shall
ever reach the goal and realize this future identity.
So to return to the ideas suggested at the beginning of this chapter: We
do act on the basis of an identity and an appreciation for the objective de-
mands we meet in the world, but this identity does not exist before the ac-
tivity as a determining cause, it exists as part of that dynamic reaching into
the future that we are. Our activity determines our identity, our freedom
determines our choice, our future determines our present. We are who we
are through our verbs. As Ilham Dilman has written, our beliefs and proj-
ects belong to us only if we actively possess them:
[A person] holds those beliefs, he forms his projects, he makes the promises and
commitments he makes, he maintains his allegiances, he dedicates himself to
their object. He is not just saddled with them.144

Nothing justifies the recognition of certain objective demands, the adop-

tion of certain values,145 yet the adoption of these values is what justifies
and constitutes us as the active, unfolding being that we are. Sartre writes:
The me with its a priori and historical content is the essence of the human be-
ing. [.....] Human beings are always separated by a nothingness from their es-
sence. [.....] Essence is what has been. [.....] It is the totality of characteristics
which explain the act. But the act is always beyond that essence; it is a human
act only in so far as it surpasses every explanation which we can give of it.146

We are temporal creatures whose being consists in crossing the gulf be-
tween present and future, in choosing to become through free acts what
we are not by nature. This is Sartre’s understanding of action and of being
human; it is also that of Thomas Aquinas.

Creating Selves: Sartre and Foucault,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4
(1996): 542.
143. BN 202; EN 239/253.
144. Ilham Dilman, “Sartre and Our Identity as Individuals,” in Human Beings: Royal In-
stitute of Philosophy Supplement: 29, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 249.
145. BN 38; EN 73/76.
146. BN 35; EN 70/72.
 Chapter 2

I de n t i t y a n d H uman
I n co m p l e t io n i n A q u i n a s

Plants, Animals, and Human Beings

Thomas Aquinas grew up in a Christian culture that took for
granted the doctrine of creation. Etienne Gilson wrote that in
the eyes of this culture the universe is “saturated with finality.”1
Everything is becoming something and going somewhere. In
this dynamic universe, according to Aquinas, living things,
such as plants and animals, have a special place. They move
themselves and so are involved in a more intimate way in the
progression of their own journey. The extraordinary thing
about human beings is that within certain limits they can de-
termine for themselves what their destination will be and how
they will get there.
Aquinas examines these themes in a discussion about the
life of God. He writes about the three types of movement that
are associated with the three types of life we find around us:
plant, animal, and human.2 Plants move in accordance with

1. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C.

Downes (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936), 104. The full sentence reads: “Born of
a final cause, the universe is necessarily saturated with finality, that is to say, we
can never in any case dissociate the explanation of things from the consider-
ation of their raison d’être.” This begs the questions of whether there is a single
end for which things exist (see this chapter and chapter 6), and whether final-
ity can be discovered without the knowledge that the universe is created (see the
conclusion).
2. ST I.18:3. I am greatly simplifying this account.

58
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 59

their inherent nature, they grow and decay in a fixed way. Animal move-
ments depend not just on their own nature but also on the nature of the
things around them as they are apprehended through the senses. Plants,
of course, are influenced by their immediate environment, but animals are
more open to the world around them and influenced by things that re-
main apart from them. The goal of an animal, however, the direction of its
movements, is still determined by its natural instincts. An animal’s deci-
sion to fight or flee, for example, while it may involve highly complex men-
tal processes, is ultimately determined by the animal’s nature and the na-
ture of its environment (the degree of danger, the possibility of escape, the
needs of its offspring, etc.). Animals, as Stephen Brock writes, “only make
themselves do what they are made to make themselves do.”3
A third type of movement belongs to human beings, since we are crea-
tures with intellect. Our life has much in common with that of plants and
animals. Yet the distinctive thing about the movement of human beings is
that “they move themselves to an end that they themselves propose.”4 The
goals of our activity are not determined solely by our nature or by the na-
ture of the world around us. Aquinas believes, in the terms of the previous
chapter, that our actions cannot be explained solely with reference to an
established identity or to the objective circumstances of our environment.
Something else is involved. The direction of our life is somehow up to us.
We choose our goals and in that choice we establish a meaning for our life
and determine the person we will become. Human identity is not some-
thing fixed and definitive, it unfolds over time, and it constantly has to be
appropriated, acknowledged, and re-created through our actions.
This whole book is an exploration of the nature of human identity,
and only in chapter 6 will we look properly at Aquinas’s understanding
of how human beings constitute themselves through their free choices. In
this present chapter we will examine two distinct aspects of the question of
identity. First, Aquinas argues that human beings have a peculiar openness
to the world around them because of their intellect. We can, in a certain
sense, share in the being of other things. We are formed by what we under-
stand, to the extent that our identity depends in part on what we identify

3. Stephen Brock, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (Edin-
burgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 35.
4. ST I.18:3c.
60 = h u m a n b e i n g

with. We are (through understanding other things) what we are not (by
our own nature). Human identity, at any one time, is therefore a result of
our willingness to go beyond ourselves and engage with what is other than
ourselves through our understanding.
The second aspect of the question concerns the transformation of iden-
tity that takes place over time through our actions. In Aquinas’s understand-
ing, all things, nonliving as well as living, are in a process of development.
In common with all things, we seek our own good, which is the perfec-
tion of our being. Human appetite is distinctive, however, because we de-
termine for ourselves which goals to seek and what form our good will take.
By seeking one particular good rather than another we ensure that one par-
ticular identity rather than another will emerge through our actions. We are
becoming (as we seek our fulfillment in this goal) what we are not (since this
goal is precisely an identity that is sought and not yet found).
There are startling similarities between the arguments of Aquinas and
those of Sartre that were presented in chapter 1. I will not allude to these
similarities much here—they will become clear as the argument develops.
Human beings never lose their identity as human, yet this very identity
consists of an ability to be transformed by our understanding of what is
present and by our desire for what is future (and what is therefore absent).
Aquinas, like Sartre, argues that we are what we are not (through the in-
tellect), and that we become what we are not (through the will). Human
identity is out there in other things and over there in the future.
It is worth making some preliminary notes here about “form” and
“matter” since Aquinas’s thinking is incomprehensible without some fa-
miliarity with these Aristotelian concepts. “Form” and “matter” are cor-
relative terms. Forma (“form”) is the inner principle that makes a thing to
be what it is. A “thing” here, and throughout this book, is not just a physi-
cal object but anything that has its own unity. The English word is as broad
and useful as its Latin equivalent, res, which has the following synonyms
associated with it in one lexicon: thing, object, concrete being, matter, af-
fair, event, fact, circumstance, occurrence, deed, condition.5 So when we
hear about understanding something or knowing the form of a thing we
have all these possibilities in mind.

5. Roy J. Deferrari and Sister M. Inviolata Barry, A Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas (Wash-
ington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948), 968.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 61

Substantial form gives a thing its fundamental constitution and shape

and character—it makes it this kind of thing and not another (the form
of an eagle or a tulip or a planet). Accidental forms modify or qualify a
thing and give it an additional characteristic without altering its substan-
tial form (the swiftness of an eagle or redness of a tulip or coldness of a
planet). Things have different degrees of stability, yet all things must have
at least some fundamental stability, some fixed form, if they are to be any
one thing rather than being simply a random collection of other things
that have no intrinsic unity and that only happen to be associated by cir-
cumstances for a certain time. Timothy McDermott writes that forms “are
stable terminations or completions of processes of genesis, destinations of
changes or movements, realizations tended towards or favoured.”6
Materia (“matter”) is that out of which the thing emerges, in which
the form exists. It could be very loosely termed the material or parts out
of which something is made. Yet this material does not exist in a pure state
“before” the thing comes to be, like bricks waiting to be handled by the
builder. A sealed bottle full of cream is shaken into butter: nothing enters
or leaves the bottle, the same “stuff ” is there, although “it” exists first as
cream, then as butter.7 An incinerator transforms wood into ash: “some-
thing” is continuous (the matter) even though two different things ex-
ist, one after the other. Scientists may identify the chemicals that underlie
changes such as these, but the philosophical concept of matter allows one
to refer to some element of continuity through every change even if one
does not understand the specific nature of the continuity. The matter is the
principle of continuity, the substratum that supports the change in struc-
ture, the “stuff ” that endures as cream becomes butter and wood becomes
ash. It is the subject of any change. Matter is open to being something, to
being formed.
Neither matter nor form exist on their own. They are the two princi-
ples that combine to constitute every corporeal thing. In every substantial
change there must be continuity of matter and change of substantial form.
To say that something has a substantial form is to say that this thing is it-

6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott

(London: Methuen, 1989).
7. The butter example is from Anthony Kenny, who has a very helpful appendix on Matter
and Form in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Thomas Gilby, 60 vols. (London: Black-
friars/ Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963ff), vol. 22, 124–25.
62 = h u m a n b e i n g

self and is not just the conglomeration of matter that went into it. Each
substance, by virtue of its substantial form, has its own level of unity, sta-
bility, and structure. This form cannot be reduced to the constitutive mat-
ter nor separated from that matter—it is the concrete forming of this par-
ticular matter.
All things have a form. The form of living things is called anima (“the
soul”),8 which is the primary principle of life, that which makes something
alive and not dead. A body can have eyes, legs, and lungs, but if it is not
alive then the form of life is missing, and it does not have a soul. The hu-
man soul, as we shall see, is distinctive because of the nature of intellect
and will.
There is no need to summarize here Aquinas’s understanding of hu-
man nature since the four Thomistic chapters of this present study are in
effect investigations into the main aspects of this question. We will reflect
on the place of the human being in the natural world; on what we have in
common with immaterial objects, with plants, with animals, with angels;
on the distinctive features of human beings as creatures of intellect and
will, whose freedom allows them to take responsibility for their lives and
their goals; and on the constitutive ambiguity of a human nature that nat-
urally seeks a perfect fulfillment that it cannot naturally find. It is worth
making a final note, however, about one aspect of the human soul that
does not receive a great deal of attention in this study; namely, its subsis-
tence. Aquinas argues that the human intellectual soul, unlike the souls of
plants and animals, is an incorporeal, subsistent principle,9 which means
that it is capable of continuing to exist after separating from its material
body at death. There is therefore a double aspect to the human soul: it in-
forms the human body, just as the soul of an animal does, yet it is also able
to exist immaterially, as the angels do. This creates a host of philosophi-
cal problems for Aquinas—for example, about how the intellect can oper-
ate when it is not united with a body10—but it is the best way he can find

8. See ST I.75:1 and I.75:5.

9. ST I.75:2c.
10. See ST I.89:1; and the introduction by Thomas S. Hibbs to Thomas Aquinas, On Hu-
man Nature (Indianapolis, Ind./Cambridge: Hackett, 1999), vii–xxi. Hibbs writes: “The intel-
lect’s transcendence of the limits of its material conditions in its very act of knowing sensible
substances seems simultaneously to allow for the intellect’s separate existence and to undercut
the possibility of its knowing anything in such a disembodied state” (xiii).
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 63

of holding onto his key insights about what it is to be a human being, and
especially about the peculiarities of a material creature that has an intel-
lectual nature. This topic is not the focus of my study, and I do not go into
the complex debates about the subsistence of the human soul;11 but it is
good to bear in mind that for Aquinas the human soul by its very nature is
open to a kind of existence quite distinct from that available to other cor-
poreal creatures. We have a double kinship: with the angels as well as with
the other animals.

Intellect, Knowledge, and Immateriality

The first distinctive aspect of human identity arises from our intellectual
nature. In the Summa theologiae, Aquinas has a number of ways of express-
ing what happens when we come to know something. He explains that
the form of the thing known is in the one who knows; the thing known
is united with the soul of the one who knows; the intellect of the one who
knows becomes what is known; the intellect abstracts the species of what
is known.12 His central insight, derived from Aristotle, is that knowledge
is a relationship that in a particular way unites the knower with what is
known.
Knowledge is not just an impression made upon us, like a poem carved
on a tree trunk or a wound inflicted in a fight. It is not something with an
extrinsic cause that nevertheless leaves us trapped within the isolation of
our own being. This kind of “experience” Aquinas calls vegetative. Nor is
knowledge just the immediate relationship animals have with the things
in their experience. Their sensitive apprehension does take them outside
their own being and unites them with what they apprehend so that they
can relate to “every sensible body, not only the body to which the soul is
united.”13 But animals, as far as we know, are unable to distinguish the ap-
prehended thing from its embodiment in each concrete experience. Their
apprehension is always clothed in their own instinctive responses to a
thing, always colored by their desires and aversions. An animal appre-
hends the thing as it belongs to this experience or even the experience of the
thing rather than the thing itself. Aquinas writes that an animal’s senses “re-

11. I pay more attention to the soul’s immateriality than to its subsistence (see the section
“Intellect, Knowledge, and Immateriality” below, and elsewhere).
12. See the various references that follow.
13. ST I.78:1c.
64 = h u m a n b e i n g

ceive the form of the thing known, without matter indeed, but subject to
material conditions.”14 Even though they can remember and plan ahead
and instinctively make connections between means and ends, they cannot
see that one thing within their experience can be more than their experi-
ence—that its form is distinct from the concrete conditions in which it is
found.
Human beings, however, through intellectual knowledge, are present
to things as they are in themselves, and not only as they are in this expe-
rience. This doesn’t mean that things are present without the experience.
We know “what is in individual matter” but “not as it is in such matter.”15
Aquinas uses the language of knowing something absolute (“absolutely,”
“as separated,” “freed” from the limitations of sense experience) and uni-
versaliter (“universally,” “in general,” “not as individual”):
Now a thing is known insofar as its form is in the knower. But the intellectual
soul knows a thing in its nature absolutely: for instance, it knows a stone abso-
lutely as a stone; and therefore the form of a stone absolutely, as to its proper for-
mal idea [secundum propriam rationem formalem], is in the intellectual soul.16

We can relate to things, Aquinas believes, as they are for themselves

and for other things in general and not only as they are for us in particu-
lar. We stand outside ourselves and affirm that the thing known does not
depend on our understanding of it. In one sense it is unimportant that the
knowledge is ours. Aquinas (following Aristotle) wants to show up the in-
adequacy of any explanations of knowing that would make knowledge a
material effect produced on or within the knower. Ultimately these would
define the known in terms of the one who knows and make it impossible
to distinguish experience of oneself from experience of one’s world. These
are the problems encountered in idealism.
Intellectual knowledge, unlike the sensitive apprehension of animals,
allows human beings to exist outside themselves, to be present to what
they are not. We can be united with what we know while at the same time
retaining the knowledge that we are not the thing known. Things with in-
tellectual souls, like human beings, receive the forms of intelligible things,
“so that the soul of the human being is, in a way, all things by sense and

14. ST I.84:2c. 15. ST I.85:1c.

16. ST I.75:5c.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 65

intellect [ut sic anima hominis sit omnia quodammodo secundum sensum
et intellectum].” 17 The soul, the human form, can become other things by
knowing them. This means that our lives are given their distinctive shape
by what we know. We are what we are not since the form our soul is given
derives from what only exists outside ourselves in the world. There is a
kind of austerity to Aquinas’s theory of knowledge: human beings do not
get in the way.
John Haldane has re-presented these Thomistic ideas in his “mind-
world identity theory,” and tried to draw out their relevance for contempo-
rary debates about “realism” and “antirealism” in the analytic tradition.18
For Haldane the two features of Aquinas’s theory of cognition that have
most bearing on the issue of epistemological realism are, “First, the insis-
tence that the intellect engages directly with reality and not with some ter-
tium quid intervening between them (concepts being the means and, apart
from in reflection, not the objects of thought). And second, the striking
claim that the forms or natures which give structure to the world, and the
concepts which give ‘shape’ to thought, are one and the same.”19 A central
epistemological idea in Aquinas, according to Haldane, is that “thought is
constituted by the world” and that the intellect “is not to be regarded as a
pre-existing cognitive mechanism but as a capacity to be informed by the
structuring principles of the world. It is, so to say, ‘not a something but
not a nothing either’—in this case being a potentiality for the reception of
form.”20
When we come to understand something it is possible to say that
nothing “happens,” there is no “action,” since no new form comes about.
There is simply the same form of whatever exists, only now this form is a
known form. The intellectual form that constitutes our knowledge is not af-
fected by the form of the thing known, it is the form of the thing known.
“The act of knowledge extends to things outside the knower: for we know
things even that are external to us [cognoscimus enim etiam ea quae extra
nos sunt].” 21 Timothy McDermott’s interpretative translation of this last

17. ST I.80:1c.
18. See his “Mind-World Identity Theory and the Anti-Realist Challenge,” in Reality, Rep-
resentation, and Projection, ed. John Haldane and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 15–37.
19. Ibid., 21. 20. Ibid., 33.
21. ST I.84:2c.
66 = h u m a n b e i n g

phrase runs: “When we know a thing it remains other than us.”22 These are
the same arguments and conclusions made by Sartre in his phenomeno-
logical account of intentionality. Human beings are not trapped in their
own interiority, looking out at the distant world and wondering how they
might make contact with it. The self is to exist beyond the self. We are “over
there” in whatever we experience, essentially open to what we are not. We
are constituted by our relationship with what is other.
The process of identification that takes place between the human be-
ing and what is known depends on the intellectus possibilis (“possible in-
tellect,” “receptive intellect”). Aquinas takes up Aristotle’s description. The
human intellect “is in potentiality with regard to things intelligible, and is
at first ‘like a clean tablet on which nothing is written,’ as the Philosopher
says in De Anima III.”23 He refers again to Aristotle in ST I.79:6 and notes
that there is an identification between the possible intellect and the indi-
vidual things it knows which (in a certain sense) actualizes it.24 The pos-
sible intellect is said “to become all things, inasmuch as it receives the [in-
telligible] species of each thing [fieri singula, secundum quod recipit species
singulorum].”25 The thing understood is in the intellect by its own “like-
ness” (similitudo).26 This language might seem to imply that we have some
kind of indirect representational knowledge. We are so used to imagin-
ing the mind as a “place” within us, and we slip into thinking that these
forms are somehow within us too. The English phrase “to have something
in mind” reflects this ambiguity—it can imply either a thought within or
an external object of mental attention. The related phrase “to have some-
thing in sight” is more clearly Thomistic: the seeing is referred to the ob-
ject as it is out there. When we say “I can’t get my mind round this” we are
suggesting that the thing we wish to understand is separate from the mind
and the mind must somehow go out to it and embrace it. These phrases are
useful because they help us to resist the idea that the form proceeds from
the thing outside to the mind within. We mean instead that human beings,
as intellectual, are able to exist out there in the forms of other things. Aqui-

22. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, 130.

23. ST I.79:2c, citing Aristotle’s De Anima 3:4, 430a1. For an English translation of the Ar-
istotle, see J. L. Ackrill, ed., A New Aristotle Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 196.
24. ST I.79:6c. Cf. Aristotle’s De Anima 3:4, 429b5. For an English translation of the Aristo-
tle, see Ackrill, ed., A New Aristotle Reader, 195.
25. ST I.79:6c. 26. ST I.85:2ad1.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 67

nas is clear that having the form or likeness involves a formal identity be-
tween knower and known:
The thing understood is in the intellect by its own likeness [per suam simili-
tudinem]; and it is in this sense that we say that the thing actually understood
is the intellect in act [intellectum in actu est intellectus in actu], because the like-
ness of the thing understood is the form of the intellect [similitude rei intellec-
tae est forma intellectus], just as the likeness of a sensible thing is the form of the
sense in act.27

Intellectum in actu est intellectus in actu: the thing when it is understood is

the understanding intellect.28
If the intellect is able to become other things in this way, it must have a
different, nonbodily nature from the bodily things that it knows, otherwise
its own bodiliness would interfere with and keep at a distance the things it
wanted to know: “Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them
in its own nature; because that which is in it naturally would impede the
knowledge of anything else.”29 Aquinas, like Sartre, uses the metaphor of
transparency to describe the intellect. We cannot see the true colors of a
liquid if the vase that holds it is not colorless and transparent, and a fever-
ish tongue cannot distinguish tastes.30 In other words, the intellect cannot
be a body because its nature is to know other bodies. The nature of the in-
tellect is to be an acknowledgment of other bodies by taking on their form
and by not having the bodiliness that they actually are. We could say that
the object of a faculty must have a different nature from the faculty itself:
sounds, for example, are not heard by other sounds but by something that
is affected by sounds (the hearing, the ear).31 The immateriality of the intel-

27. ST I.85:2ad1.
28. There is an active aspect to the whole process of understanding which I do not pay
much attention to in this chapter. The intellect has the power to “abstract” forms from the
things it meets. Concrete experiences (“forms existing in matter”; “formae autem in materia
existentes non sunt intelligibiles actu”) are not actually intelligible, “we must therefore assign
on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible, by abstraction of
the species from material conditions” (ST I.79:3c). We have to light up and understand the im-
mediate impressions (phantasmata) which things have made on us (ST I.79:4). For Aquinas’s
theory of abstraction and universals, see ST I.85.
29. ST I.75:2c. 30. ST I.75:2c.
31. There is a good discussion of this in Norman Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 132–33.
68 = h u m a n b e i n g

lectual soul is simply the ability of human beings to be formed by what they
are not. Human life, as we have seen, is open to the presence of other things
in a distinctive way, it is not limited by its own bodily form. In fact the form
of its body, its very nature, is not to be a form limited by a particular mate-
rial body, it is rather to be the form of what it understands. Our existence is
larger than ourselves—this is why our intellect is said to be immaterial.
Herbert McCabe writes that the noncorporeal nature of understanding
is meant to be obvious, it is a platitude and not an explanation of the pro-
cess of understanding:
It says “what I have in mind when I know the nature of a cow is the nature of a
cow and nothing else.” [To understand the nature of a cow] is to have this nature
precisely without being a cow, and this is what is made clear by saying that one
has the nature in mind. To have it in mind doesn’t mean anything except that
you have the nature without being the thing whose nature it is.32

If the intellect were a body, it would necessarily have a different sort of rela-
tionship with other bodies, one dependent on bodily change, which would
never allow the intellect to go beyond each particular change and draw any
wider conclusions through questioning and abstraction. Timothy Suttor
writes that for Aquinas “thinking is being things,” and Aquinas’s proof of
the nonbodiliness of human intelligence is intelligible “only in the light of
this principle: to be able-to-be all bodies, a thing must not-actually-be any
body.”33 The intellectual soul that becomes other forms must itself be “an
absolute form, and not something composed of matter and form.”34
The immateriality of the intellect and of the forms that are known
should not be thought of as some sort of dualism that would take us away
from the material world of human beings and the things they know. It
is the individual, concrete, material things that are known through their
forms. The nonbodiliness of the intellect allows us to look through or bet-
ter still into the objects and situations we sense so that we can know what
they are and not just what they are doing to us at this very moment. When
we go beyond the instinctive delight we take in an object’s shape and color

32. Herbert McCabe, “The Immortality of the Soul,” in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. Anthony Kenny (London and South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1976), 304.
33. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 11, footnote b, 10.
34. ST I.75:5c.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 69

and understand it to be a bird or a computer or a clock, our relationship

with the object is no less real. But this grasping of its form though knowl-
edge gives us an involvement with its being that cannot come from mere
sense apprehension. We have in-sight as well as sight, re-cognition as well
as cognition. This deeper, second glance can have no possible source in our
own bodily nature since all bodies, even those of sophisticated animals,
can only react to what they encounter—they cannot think about things.

The Openness of the Human Form

The intellect, then, takes on the form of what is known. Through our in-
tellect we identify with what is known. Could this still mean that human
beings have a fundamental substantial identity and in addition they iden-
tify with other things through the formation of their intellect? In other
words, it might seem that human beings could have two forms: (1) their
soul (which is the substantial form of the body, which makes them living
human beings), and (2) the intellectual forms (taken from things known).
Aquinas repudiates this possibility and insists that “there is no other sub-
stantial form in the human being besides the intellectual soul [nulla alia
forma substantialis est in homine nisi sola anima intellectiva].”35
We must assert that the intellect which is the principle of intellectual operation
is the form of the human body. For that whereby primarily anything acts is the
form of the thing to which the act is to be attributed: for instance, that whereby
a body is primarily healed is health, and that whereby the soul knows primar-
ily is knowledge; hence health is a form of the body, and knowledge is a form of
the soul. The reason is because nothing acts except so far as it is in act; where-
fore a thing acts by that whereby it is in act. Now it is clear that the first thing by
which the body lives is the soul. And as life appears through various operations
in different degrees of living things, that whereby we primarily perform each
of all these vital actions is the soul. For the soul is the primary principle of our
nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understand-
ing. Therefore this principle by which we primarily understand, whether it be
called the intellect or the intellectual soul, is the form of the body. This is the
demonstration used by Aristotle in De Anima II.36

35. ST I.76:4c.
36. ST I.76:1c. Referring to Aristotle’s De Anima 2:2, 414a4–19. For an English version, see
Ackrill, ed., A New Aristotle Reader, 169.
70 = h u m a n b e i n g

This argument depends on an understanding of “form” as the princi-

ple that gives shape to an activity. The distinctive activity of the human
soul is to know, and so knowledge is that which forms the soul. The dis-
tinctive activity of the whole human being is to live with understanding,
and so this “knowing aliveness” (the intellectual soul) is the very thing
that forms the human body. The intellectual soul, itself formed by what
it knows, is what forms the human body. Who we are and how we act de-
pends on what we know. Our lives are animated by our understanding and
our whole bodily life and activity is shaped by our identification with the
world through knowledge.
If we keep in mind Aquinas’s conception of form, we will appreciate
the radical nature of his thinking on this subject. The form of a thing is
the inner principle that makes this thing to be what it is and gives it a par-
ticular constitution and shape and character. So Aquinas is saying that the
inner principle of each human life, which constitutes it and gives it shape
and character, comes from the nature of what we understand and not sim-
ply from our bodily nature. Understanding is used in its broadest sense
here to encompass the multifarious ways that human beings conceive of
things and make sense of them—it is not limited to the “head” knowledge
of the logician or the scientist. Our individual identity, who we are, thus
depends in part on what we understand (and the way we understand) and
not just on our genes or our physiology or our instinctive temperament or
any other factor that makes up the form of our animal nature.37 When we

37. It could be objected that Aquinas’s conception of personhood suggests a much more
static understanding of individual human identity. There is no space here to explore properly
his definitions of the word “person.” See, e.g., ST I.29; Commentum in quatuor libros Senten-
tiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris angelici ordinis predica-
torum Opera omnia ad fidem optimarum editionum accurate recognita, vols. 6–7 (Parma: ty-
pis Petri Fiaccadori, 1856–1858), I.25:1:1; and De potentia, in Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2, ed.
P. Pession (Turin/Rome: Marietti, 1953), 9:2. At this stage it is enough to point out that his use
of Boethius’s definition (persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia; “a person is an in-
dividual substance of a rational nature”) does not in any way exclude the more developmental
and open-ended account of individual identity presented in this discussion of the intellectual
soul in ST I.76—indeed it prepares the way for it. In ST I.29:1c, for example, Aquinas argues
that the point of putting the word “rational” into the definition of “person” is that particularity
and individuality are found in a more special and perfect way in rational substances, “which
have dominion over their own actions; and which are not only acted upon, like other things,
but which can act of themselves [sed per se agunt].” So human action, which will include the
remarkable ability of the intellectual soul to be transformed by what it understands, is one sig-
nificant aspect of subsisting individual that is the person.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 71

describe the character of others we often acknowledge this aspect of hu-

man identity by referring to their understanding. We talk about how peo-
ple see the world, what their interests are, what they think about, what they
care about, and if they have no interests or thoughts or cares we are hard-
pressed to say who they are at all.
This is what Aquinas means when he says that we are formed by what
we understand: we are what we attend to (with our understanding), and
what we attend to influences everything significant about us. It’s tempt-
ing to suggest instead that the forms of knowledge are merely accidental
forms, and that the core identity of the human person is constituted by the
unchanging substantial form of the body which is the human soul—as if
we had a “substantial identity” (perhaps one described by the definition of
“person”), and an “accidental identity” (which would develop as our un-
derstanding developed). But it bears repeating that “there is no other sub-
stantial form in the human being besides the intellectual soul”;38 and that
“the likeness of the thing understood is the form of the intellect [simili-
tude rei intellectae est forma intellectus].”39 So the so-called core substantial
form, our constitutive identity, is actually one with our changing under-
standing of things; it is fluid, dynamic, open—as open as the intellect itself.
This does not mean that we cease to exist as individual substances when we
are not actively understanding (all sorts of clarifications are needed here);
but it does mean that as our understanding is transformed so our very be-
ing is transformed—since we are constituted in part by whatever form the
intellectual soul has taken on.
The whole of a human life, and not just one part of it, is dependent
on what someone is concerned with, and is given direction by it, and so
the human form cannot be limited by the concrete nature of each life. The
distinction here is not between a solid body and some kind of detachable
spirit, it is between the given totality of a human life (body, psychology,
history, etc.) and the fact that this human life can be given new meaning
and purpose through its presence to other things. This new meaning that
arises through our understanding could not be generated if we had a fully
determined bodily form. It is the comprehensive understanding we have
of ourselves and of the world that gives shape to our lives and determines

38. ST I.76:4c.
39. ST I.85:2ad1.
72 = h u m a n b e i n g

who we are. Our life has no shape apart from that given to it by our under-
standing. The form of the human being is the form of the world known to
us. One could say that the human being is the world as understood. We are
what we understand, and our body is therefore out there in what we know.
Further weight is given to this conclusion through Aquinas’s conten-
tion that the intellect cannot know itself as an object of its own knowledge
but only through its activity. It does not, in itself, have its own form (which
might have given it a certain identity and allowed it to become an object
of knowledge). Its only form is that taken from the things it knows. Con-
sidered in its essence “the human mind is potentially understanding” and
does not have the power “to be understood” outside its activity of know-
ing.40 Its essence is to have the ability to be other things through their form.
To put it in more Sartrean language, the essence of the human intellectual
soul is not to be or to be what it is not; it is not to have its own form but to
have the forms of other things:
But as in this life our intellect has material and sensible things for its proper nat-
ural object, as stated above [cf. ST I.84:7], so it follows that our intellect under-
stands itself insofar as it is made actual by the species abstracted from sensible
things, through the light of the active intellect, which not only actuates the in-
telligible things themselves, but also, by their instrumentality, actuates the pos-
sible intellect. Therefore our intellect knows itself not by its essence, but by its
act. This happens in two ways: In the first place, singularly, as when Socrates or
Plato perceives that he has an intellectual soul because he perceives that he un-
derstands. In the second place, universally, as when we consider the nature of
the human mind [naturam humanae mentis] from knowledge of the intellec-
tual act.41

This first type of self-consciousness or self-awareness is implicit in every

act of understanding. It is not knowledge of a form (like all other knowl-
edge). It is knowledge of an act (of knowing) and of a relationship (be-
tween knower and known). It is knowledge of an essence (the intellect)
that does not have any identity except the identity it takes from other
things. For this first type of self-consciousness “the mere presence of the
mind suffices, which is the principle of action whereby the mind perceives

40. ST I.87:1c.
41. ST I.87:1c.
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itself [sufficit ipsa mentis praesentia, quae est principium actus ex quo mens
percipit seipsam], and hence it is said to know itself by its own presence.”42
The mind is knowing its own knowing, and so is in some way at the same
time within that knowing as a participant and detached from that know-
ing as an observer—it is present to itself. This has an effect on the knowl-
edge we have of things. If we are not only present to things but also present
to our presence to things we are therefore conscious of the relationship be-
tween things and ourselves. This is why unlike that of animals, our knowl-
edge has the kind of objectivity described above. We can take account of
our place in the knowledge and factor it out and thereby acknowledge the
reality of things as they are apart from their relation to us. Our intellectual
presence to things as they are (and not only as they are for us) and our self-
consciousness are one and the same thing. The “self ” we are conscious of
is not another “thing” (with a form) but a “nothing,” a lack of form, a “not
being” the form of what is known.
From this we can conclude that no amount of mental introspection
will reveal our core identity. The only identity we have is actively consti-
tuted through that relationship we have with the world around us through
understanding. The human form is therefore changing and is itself deter-
mined by the active knowing of each person. There is, as Sartre would say,
no transcendental ego. We cannot find ourselves, we have to make our-
selves by knowing other things. David Burrell, commenting on a different
aspect of Aquinas’s thought, comes to the same conclusion:
I have remarked how Aquinas’ analysis of action appears truncated. For it seems
that the development of habitus as a proximate principle of activity demands
one more step: to articulate what it is who acts. Such a step would carry us to
the “transcendental ego.” But Aquinas neatly avoids that problem by recogniz-
ing there is no step at all. The one who acts, as Aquinas views the matter, is ar-
ticulated in the remote and proximate principles of action. Nothing more need
be said because nothing more can be said: the self we know is known by those
characteristics which mark it.43

42. ST I.87:1c.
43. David B. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1979), 129. See Romanus Cessario, Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics (South
Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 35–40, on how the personal development of
habitus (character) transforms the very constitution of oneself.
74 = h u m a n b e i n g

In these two sections we have been examining a distinctive aspect of hu-

man identity that arises from our nature as intellectual creatures. We are
formed by what we understand and we share in the being of other things.
Our own identity depends on what we choose to identify with. We can
now look at the human appetite, which allows us to reconstitute our iden-
tity over time in a more dynamic way. As willing creatures we pursue a
particular good and through our actions determine which goal we shall
seek and what form our good will take.

Being, Goodness, and Perfection

Aquinas approaches “the good,” bonum, from two directions. First, the
good is something desired in order to perfect whatever desires it. Second,
the good is a being insofar as it has been perfected. The two approaches are
brought together in this way: the good is the perfection sought by a being
through the attainment of what is desired.44
Aquinas emphasizes the first approach to the good in De veritate 21:1.
He asks whether the good “adds something” to being, which is a way of
asking about the use and meaning of the term bonum. He quotes with ap-
proval Aristotle’s preliminary definition of the good: “bonum est quod
omnia appetunt” (“the good is that which all things desire [or seek or aim
at]”).45 He goes on to say that the good adds something to being secun-
dum rationem tantum, which means “in concept only” or “only according
to reason” or “purely as an idea.”

44. Aquinas often writes about one’s goals, one’s ends, the goods one desires, the values
one seeks, the perfection one longs for. It sounds as if, in his philosophical system, human be-
ings are inherently selfish, capable only of seeking their own fulfillment at the expense of that
of everyone else. Yet it needs to be said very clearly that for Aquinas (and indeed for Sartre)
“the good that we desire,” “the fulfillment that we seek,” lies wherever we put it. So we can find
our good and fulfillment, for example, in the well-being of a spouse or a stranger or a commu-
nity as much as we can in the pleasures of our own body or in the success of our own work. We
can choose to make their good into our own end. Indeed we can find our good in absolutely
anything that we choose. The good is simply what we seek, what we care about—even if it is
not caring about “ourselves.” The fact that we can seek things in a way that means something
to us personally (“my good,” “my perfection”) is the very thing that ensures that our other-
directed actions (“for you,” “for them”) are still our own actions. This is why love can be disin-
terested and personal at the same time. There is no contradiction in loving the other for one’s
own sake or in seeking the good of the other because it will make one happy. This meaning of
“one’s good” should be borne in mind throughout the book.
45. DV 21:1c, citing Nichomachean Ethics, 1:1, 1094a3. For an English version, see Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985), 1.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 75

The good is therefore not a constitutive and defining characteristic of a

thing (it does not add to being “as limiting and determining it”).46 A horse
is still a horse even if it is not a good horse. Nor is the good an additional
characteristic that something might possess for a time and then lose (it is
not “some reality which is outside the essence of the thing to which it is
said to be added”).47 A horse is a horse whether it is awake or asleep, hot
or cold, fat or thin. Instead, the concept that good adds to being is one of a
certain kind of relation (aliqua relatio). In this type of relation a first thing
relates to a second thing even though the first thing is not affected by the
relationship; one thing influences another thing without being influenced
by that other thing in return.48 Aquinas gives the example of human un-
derstanding. When we know the truth about something we have a certain
relationship with it. In this case the thing known is not changed when it
becomes known, even though the mind of the knower is changed through
this relation with what is known. He then goes on to write about the good:
Inasmuch as one being by reason of its being is such as to perfect and complete
another, it functions as an end to that which is perfected by it [habet rationem
finis respectu illius quod ab eo perficitur]. And hence it is that all who rightly de-
fine good put in its concept [in ratione eius] something about its status as an
end.49

It is clear how wide ranging this use of “good” is. If the language of desire
(appetitus) is never far away, one should remember that desire is an ana-
logical term that applies to all relationships that involve attraction and per-
fection—from bodies falling and finding their “preferred” place of rest to
spiritual beings willing and discovering their happiness.50
To say that something is good, therefore, is to point to a particular type
of relationship it can have with something else. The house is good for those
who live in it; the fire is good for those who are warmed by it; the mu-
sic is good to those who listen to it. These things are good insofar as they

46. DV 21:1c.
47. DV 21:1c.
48. DV 21:1c, when “something is said to be referred which is not dependent upon that to
which it is referred, but vice versa.”
49. DV 21:1c.
50. Cf. David M. Gallagher, “Aquinas on Goodness and Moral Goodness,” in Thomas
Aquinas and His Legacy, ed. David M. Gallagher, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Phi-
losophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 38–40.
76 = h u m a n b e i n g

attract and perfect other things. Of course their goodness is inseparable

from what they are in themselves. They are desired because they are de-
sirable, and their desirability is absolutely dependent on their being. Yet if
we know that something is good we know more than simply what it is. The
good is coextensive with being but not synonymous with it.51 “The essence
of a thing considered absolutely suffices for the thing to be called a being
[ens] on its account, but not thereby to be called good.”52 The good adds
nothing to being except the concept of being an end. This conceptual addi-
tion, however, is no less real than the essence of what something is, since
“to that concept something does correspond in reality [isti rationi aliquid
respondet in re], that is, a real dependence of that which is directed to the
end upon the end itself [realis dependentia eius quod est ad finem ad finem
ipsum].”53
Aquinas takes the second approach to good (as the perfection of being)
in ST I.5. Perfectio, “perfection,” has many senses (“accomplishment,” “fin-
ish,” “attribute,” “endowment,” “excellence,” etc.)—all of which imply some
sort of completion. It may be the completion of a process or of the acquisi-
tion of a property or of the total fulfillment of all the possibilities of a given
substance. Aquinas once again starts with Aristotle’s definition of the good
as that which all desire, but instead of discussing the desire one thing has
for another, he begins with the desire each being has for its own perfection:
The Philosopher says (Ethics 1): “Goodness is what all things desire [bonum est
quod omnia appetunt].” Now it is clear that a thing is desirable [appetibile] only
in so far as it is perfect; for all things desire their own perfection. But everything
is perfect so far as it is actual. Therefore it is clear that a thing is good so far as
it exists [est ens]; for it is existence [esse] that makes all things actual, as is clear
from the foregoing [cf. ST I.3:4 and I.4:1]. Hence it is clear that what is good and
what has being are one and the same thing. But calling it good expresses the as-
pect of desirableness, which saying it has being does not express [Unde manifes-
tum est quod bonum et ens sunt idem secundum rem, sed bonum dicit rationem
appetibilis, quam non dicit ens].54

51. See ibid., 40–42. 52. DV 21:1ad1.

53. DV 21:1ad9.
54. ST I.5:1c. Citing Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics 1:1, 1094a3. For an English version, see
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 77

The good, therefore, is the completion or perfection sought by each thing,

the existence that each thing seeks to achieve. But if the good and being
are the same in things themselves (secundum rem), this raises a number of
questions. How can something that already has being seek a being for itself
that it does not have? Does this mean that it seeks to become what it is not,
which suggests that it seeks its own annihilation?
These questions are answered implicitly in the reply to the first objec-
tion: “By its substantial being, everything is said to have being simply; but
by any further actuality it is said to have being in a certain respect [dicitur
aliquid esse secundum quid].” 55 The substantial being is what makes one
thing this thing and not another, it allows us to identify it and distinguish
it from whatever existed before it and from whatever exists around it: the
child, the tree. The relative being, the “further actuality” (actus superaddi-
tos), is any further kind of existence that this substantial being can have:
the child as kind, the tree as tall.56 Relative being perfects substantial be-
ing, it makes something actual in this substantial being that did not exist
before. This perfection is the extra or additional being desired by the sub-
stantial being. It is coextensive with the good of the substantial being.
Hence that which has ultimate perfection is said to be simply good; but that
which has not the ultimate perfection it ought to have (although, in so far as it
is at all actual, it has some perfection), is not said to be perfect simply nor good
simply, but only in a certain respect [non tamen dicitur perfectum simpliciter,
nec bonum simpliciter, sed secundum quid].57

So the choice is not between “being and not being,” but between “being
and more being.” There is, however, one hugely important point to note.
The perfection achieved, the additional being, is not like an external pos-
session that leaves the substantial being indifferent and unaffected. The
perfections do not stand to the substance as a hat on someone’s head or a
magnet on a fridge door. It is the substantial being itself that is perfected:
the child is kind, and does not exist at this moment except as kind; the tree
is tall, and tallness is not something added to an otherwise small tree, it
simply is the present existence of this tree. At any moment there is only
55. ST I.5:1ad1.
56. Cf. DV 21:2ad6, “A thing can be called good both from its being and from some added
property or state.”
57. ST I.5:1ad1.
78 = h u m a n b e i n g

one actual being, which is this substantial thing perfected in these ways
and existing in these forms.
We should at all costs avoid thinking that there is a core substantial be-
ing that remains unaffected by superficial changes. Aquinas wants to show
how something can change and become more what it “is,” without ceasing
to be what it was all along, without losing its identity. There are always two
ways of looking at anything: in terms of its unchanging identity (its sub-
stantial being), and in terms of what it could become (its perfection). This
allows Aquinas to say something quite startling:
In this way, therefore, viewed in its primal (i.e., substantial) being [primum esse,
quod est substantiale], a thing is said to be simply and to be good in a certain
respect (i.e., in so far as it has being), but viewed in its complete actuality [ul-
timum actum], a thing is said to be in a certain respect and to be good simply
[dicitur aliquid ens secundum quid, et bonum simpliciter].58

In other words, in the light of what it could yet be (“its complete actuality,”
its unqualified goodness), a thing exists only secundum quid, in a certain
sense: “a thing is said to be in a certain sense.” So in relation to the good,
each thing lacks being, it lacks itself as perfected. Someone could ask: Why
say “lacks itself ” instead of just saying “lacks perfection”? One could an-
swer: Because what is lacked is the whole substantial being as perfected
and not just the additional perfections themselves. The child doesn’t just
want to possess “kindness,” the child wants to be a kind child, which it is
not; the tree doesn’t just strive to possess “tallness,” it strives to be a tall
tree, which it is not yet. Something becomes good through perfections in
the accidental order, yet these accidents are not themselves good, rather
they make the thing itself to be good. The imperfect wants to be more per-
fect. To seek one’s good is, in one specific sense only, to seek to be what
one is not.59 As Aquinas will say later in Part I-II, “It happens with some
things, that they have being in some respect, and yet they are lacking in the
fullness of being due to them.”60 For this reason, even before considering
58. ST I.5:1ad1.
59. In DV 21:5 Aquinas uses the language of generation, which he defines as a “motion to-
ward being.” To receive substantial being is to be generated without qualification (simpliciter);
to receive accidental being, that is, to be perfected, is to be generated in a certain sense (secun-
dum quid). If something seeks its own good, it is seeking its own being, and this shows that in
a certain respect it lacks its own being.
60. ST I-II.18:1c.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 79

the special nature of the human appetite, we can see how at any given mo-
ment the identity of anything at all is unstable and open to development.
The very being of anything can be changed and can be perfected or dimin-
ished, so nothing has a fixed and invulnerable identity—despite the con-
tinuation of its substantial form.
So there are two approaches to the good: it is something desired by an-
other in order to perfect whatever desires it; and it is a being in so far as it
has been perfected. The two approaches are brought together in this way:
the good is the perfection sought by a being through the attainment of what
is desired. The end which is sought through another being is always the
perfection of the being which does the seeking. The “external” good always
refers to the “internal” good of the one seeking. The root of all desire is
not solely a desire for something else but a desire for the perfection of the
seeker’s being—to attain this perfection if it is not yet attained and to love
or “enjoy” what is already possessed.61

The Will as Rational Appetite

We are now in a position to understand Aquinas’s descriptions of appetite.
The outlines of his thinking are presented in ST I.80:1.
Some inclination follows every form: for example, fire, by its form, is inclined to
rise, and to generate its like. Now, the form is found to have a superior existence
in those things which have knowledge [cognitionem] than in those which lack
knowledge. In anything lacking in knowledge we find only the form which de-
termines that thing to its own one existence, namely its natural form. Therefore
this natural form is followed by a natural inclination, which is called the natu-
ral appetite. But in those things which have knowledge, each one is determined
to its own natural being by its natural form, in such a manner that it is never-
theless receptive of the species of other things: for example, sense receives the
species of all things sensible, and the intellect of all things intelligible, so that
the soul of the human being is, in a way, all things by sense and intellect; and
thereby, those things that have knowledge, in a way, approach to a likeness to
God, “in whom all things pre-exist,” as Dionysius says.

61. Cf. DV 21:2c, “For whatever does not yet participate in the act of being tends toward it
by a certain natural appetite. [.....] But everything which already has being naturally loves its
being and with all its strength preserves it.”
80 = h u m a n b e i n g
Therefore, as forms exist in those things that have knowledge in a higher man-
ner and above the manner of natural forms, so must there be in them an in-
clination surpassing the natural inclination, which is called the natural appe-
tite. And this superior inclination belongs to the appetitive power of the soul,
through which the animal is able to desire what it apprehends, and not only that
to which it is inclined by its natural form. And so it is necessary to assign an ap-
petitive power to the soul.62

It is thus a principle of Aquinas’s philosophy that inclination is depen-

dent on form: fire, for example, rises and burns. In things that lack “aware-
ness” (cognitio is wider than intellectual knowledge) the significant factor
is its natural form. This form leads to a fully determined inclination or ap-
petite which will be fulfilled if there is no external impediment. This incli-
nation constitutes a thing’s natural appetite. Weeds grow, stones sink, foot-
balls bounce. The kind of action and the kind of perfection depends on the
kind of being something is, on its form.
Things with awareness, like animals, also receive the forms of other
things,63 so their inclinations are determined by two types of form: by what
they are and what they apprehend, by their nature and their environment.
Animals, of course, are reacting not just to what they apprehend through
the senses as it is apprehended, they are reacting to what it means to them
and how it relates to their own good. Their potentia aestimativa (“estima-
tive” power) allows them to form intentions and see something as good or
bad for their purposes. A sheep flees a wolf because it is dangerous (and
not because its physical appearance is repulsive); a bird collects twigs be-
cause they are useful for nest building (and not because it takes pleasure in
the sensation of carrying twigs). The “estimation” of danger and usefulness
require more than mere sense perception. Here Aquinas allows to animals
something that Sartre reserves for human beings, namely, the power to
go beyond the positive information provided through sense about some-
thing’s being in order to apprehend its usefulness. All these inclinations,
which arise through the operation and interpretation of sense, constitute
an animal’s sensitive appetite.
Human beings, like all other animals, have a sensitive appetite. We are
naturally inclined to react in a certain way to what we apprehend through

62. ST I.80:1c, citing Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus 5.

63. Species is synonymous with forma.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 81

our senses. This sensitive appetite has two aspects: we are concupiscent (we
are attracted to what is good for us and repelled by what is harmful), and
we are irascible (we resist those things that get in the way of our good or
produce harm).64 Love, hate, and aggression are perfectly natural passions,
and like most animals we quarrel about things like food and sex.65 Ani-
mals form these intentions “only by some natural instinct,” while human
beings gain them through the “particular reason” which makes a “compar-
ison of individual intentions.”66
Given that we have so much in common with other animals, a ques-
tion remains: Is our inclination to a particular good determined solely by
our natural form and by our environment as it is apprehended through the
senses? Are we no different from other animals? Aquinas’s answer is clear.
Although the sensitive appetite (moved through the estimative power) de-
termines the actions of animals, the extraordinary thing about the human
sensitive appetite (moved through the particular reason) is that it is itself
determined by other powers. Human beings are not controlled by the sen-
sitive appetite, rather they control the sensitive appetite. First, the particu-
lar reason is “guided and moved according to universal reason” that draws
“particular conclusions from universal principles.” “Anyone can experience
this in himself: for by applying certain universal considerations, anger or
fear or the like may be calmed down or stirred up.”67 Second, the sensi-
tive appetite does not move the human being unless it is commanded by a
higher appetite, a rational appetite, namely, the will:
For in other animals movement follows at once the concupiscible and irascible
appetites: for instance, the sheep, fearing the wolf, flees at once [statim fugit],
because it has no superior appetite which goes against it. On the contrary, hu-
man beings are not moved at once [homo non statim movetur], according to the
irascible and concupiscible appetites, but they await the command of the will,
which is the superior appetite.68

Our instinctive desires and fears, just like those of animals, are real (they
belong to us) and immediate (we do not argue to them from abstract
principles). Yet unlike other animals, we have a particular kind of dis-

64. These technical terms do not have the negative connotations of lust and irritability
that they have today.
65. ST I.81:2c. 66. ST I.78:4c.
67. ST I.81:3c. 68. ST I.81:3c.
82 = h u m a n b e i n g

tance or detachment from them. They do not move us statim, “at once,”
“immediately”—instead there needs to be a process of mediation to make
them effective. There is a gap between apprehension and action, between
having a desire and being directed by that desire. This does not separate
us from our immediate sensitive appetite—it still always belongs to us.
But given a certain desire or fear or sense of anger we can do two things
before we act: (1) we can think more deeply about what is really the case
and (2) we can ponder more deeply what we really want. In both these
ways we are able to put the immediate situation and our immediate reac-
tions into a larger context. This context is discovered by our reason (whose
job is to make a larger sense of what we already know from principles we
already have), and this context is evaluated by our will (whose job is to
seek our most complete good in the light of the possibilities this large con-
text offers). It is the passivity of the sensitive appetite that marks it out—it
is moved by whatever is apprehended. The rational appetite, in contrast,
works out whether a particular thing apprehended leads to a more univer-
sal good.69 Quite often one particular thing may lead to many more uni-
versal goods, and many different particular things may lead to the same
more universal good. This is why, as we shall see, human beings are free to
determine what they seek.
In this account human beings are not completely caught up within the
momentum of their own seeking. It may seem a small thing for Aquinas
to state that we question our desires and fears. But this means that within
certain limits we question and therefore decide upon what our goals are
and what our own good is to be. Rational creatures, as Aquinas wrote in
the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter, “move themselves to an
end that they themselves propose.”70 As far as we know, this doesn’t hap-
pen with other animals. However sophisticated they are (and our appre-
ciation of their sophistication has increased enormously since Aquinas’s
time), their agency is limited. Even when they execute their own actions
and form them and seem to weigh up alternative paths they are still, in the
words of Stephen Brock, “adjusting a predetermined inclination (desire)
according to the perceived circumstances, in virtue of an equally predeter-
mined regulative principle (‘instinct’).” He continues:

69. ST I.80:2c, I.80:2ad2, and I.82:5c.

70. ST I.18:3c.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 83
What voluntary agents have, in addition to execution and formation, is the ini-
tiation or adoption of the very inclination itself, as a principle of movement,
and the formulation of the rule or the criteria by which to judge among the
things to be ordered to the object of inclination.71

The actual process of comparing one thing with another is the work of
reason. In answer to a suggestion that the will, like the sensitive appetite,
is necessarily moved by whatever the intellect apprehends (ST I.82:2obj3),
Aquinas writes:
The sensitive power is not a power which compares different things with each
other [non est vis collativa diversorum], as reason is, and it simply apprehends
some one thing. Therefore, according to that one thing, it moves the sensitive
appetite in a determinate way. But the reason is a comparison of several things
together [ratio est collativa plurium], therefore from several things the intellec-
tual appetite (that is, the will) may be moved, and not of necessity from one
thing [ex pluribus moveri potest appetitus intellectivus, scilicet voluntas, et non ex
uno ex necessitate].72

It may seem that an animal is “pulled in different directions” and in-

clined to many conflicting goods at the same time: a sheep wants to eat its
supper and flee the wolf and laze around in the sun. It is true that in this
case some sort of “judgment” has to be made, but in animals this judgment
is made ex naturali instinctu, “from natural instinct.”73 The goods have a
natural order and in the end one takes priority and overrides the others.
In this sense the sheep does not ultimately have a doubt about which good
to pursue. In the end, only one good is actually possible, and the sheep, for
example, just runs. Even when a dog pauses on the shore and has to “de-
cide” whether it is best to fetch the stick from the turbulent sea or to re-
main safely on the shore, this process of decision making takes place in-
stinctively. The result has an underlying inevitably, given the individual
animal and its particular circumstances, even if it is impossible for an ob-
server or for the dog itself to predict what that decision will be. “All that
share in one nature act in the same way.”74
Human judgments are “from some act of comparison [collatio] in the

71. Brock, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action, 38.
72. ST I.82:2ad3. 73. ST I.83:1c.
74. ST I-II.13:2ad3.
84 = h u m a n b e i n g

reason, therefore [a human being] acts from free judgment and can be in-
clined to various things. For reason in contingent matters may follow op-
posite courses [Ratio enim circa contingentia habet viam ad opposita].”75
This topic will form the subject of chapter 6. We can say briefly here that
reason allows us to hold together different goods without ordering them
before there is even a scale of ordering. We have to compare them not with
an external scale (which could only issue in one result) but with each other.
The decision to pursue one in preference to the others creates a scale on the
basis of which they are ordered. We could go to a restaurant or to the cin-
ema or to the circus, each one is actually possible, each one would be rea-
sonable. “Since the deliberating reason is disposed to opposite things, the
will can go to either [Quod ratio deliberans se habet ad opposita, voluntas in
utrumque potest].”76
Reason is a reflective power and rational agents can control their judg-
ments.77 “To judge about one’s own judgment belongs only to reason,
which reflects upon its own act and knows the relationships of the things
about which it judges and of those by which it judges.”78 This is why “the
root of all freedom lies in the reason [totius libertatis radix est in ratione
constituta].”79 Like other animals we discover goods and evils in the world
that will affect us in different ways and we notice our own instinctive in-
clinations and aversions to these. Yet our actual response to each situation
depends on which good we choose to seek and on how we choose to un-
derstand things. Intellect and will working together, as we shall see prop-
erly in chapter 6, allow us to determine our goals for ourselves. For this
reason our unfolding identity is in part a consequence and not simply a
cause of the choices we make about our goals. In other words, we form our-
selves.

Human Beings Are Not Sheep

We have been looking at the two distinctive aspects of human identity.
First, as intellectual creatures, we share in the being of other things and
are formed by what we understand. Our identity is out there in the world.

75. ST I.83:1c. 76. ST I-II.6:2ad2.

77. For a very clear explanation of the relation between the judgment of reason and free-
dom, see David M. Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgement in Thomas Aquinas,” Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie 76 (1994). See also chapter 6.
78. DV 24:2c. 79. DV 24:2c.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 85

Second, in common with all things, our identity develops over time as we
seek the perfection of our being. Furthermore, as creatures with a rational
appetite, and not just a sensitive one, the course of this development is up
to us, and we determine for ourselves which goal we shall seek and what
form our good will take. Our identity is over there in the future. At this in-
troductory stage it has been necessary to treat intellect and rational appe-
tite separately, and this makes it hard to appreciate how closely connected
their work is in the integrated life of the human being. We will go on to ex-
amine properly their interdependence as it manifests itself in the act of un-
derstanding (chapter 4) and in the act of choosing (chapter 6).
It might help to conclude this chapter by applying Aquinas’s account of
identity to two of Sartre’s examples. Aquinas has used the example of fear
to illustrate the role of both reason and will. The sheep flees the wolf as
soon as it is afraid; the human being, equally frightened, nevertheless waits
for the judgment of reason and the command of the will.80 We can com-
pare this with Sartre’s reformed gambler.81 Let’s say that this man is moti-
vated by a fear of gambling, which perhaps represents a wider fear of bank-
ruptcy or of failure. He is, paradoxically, reassured by this fear; he depends
on it and is defined by it. It keeps him safe. But then he realizes that he can
put this very fear in question. The atmosphere of the casino beckons to
him and he imagines himself beyond his fear in a paradise of riches and
adulation. His response will be determined by whichever plans issue from
his present thinking and desiring, and not simply by his initial instinctive
reactions. Fear does not rule him, it is ruled (or measured or weighed) by
him. His actions will depend on which measure he chooses.
Aquinas says as much in fewer words: we are not sheep. The sheep flees
the wolf at once because it is afraid.82 Aquinas’s human being, call him
the gambler, is different. When he is terrified by the “wolf ” (the roulette
wheel) Aquinas says that by applying “certain universal considerations” he
may calm down or stir up his fear.83 Perhaps he mulls over some univer-
sal considerations such as these: “Each time one goes to the table one has
a real chance of winning”; “One’s luck can increase as well as decrease”; “It
is possible to mortgage one’s house to pay one’s debts.” These indisputable

80. ST I.81:3c—see above.

81. See my chapter 1 and BN 32–33; EN 67–69/69–71.
82. ST I.81:3c. 83. ST I.81:3c.
86 = h u m a n b e i n g

truths allow him to resize and overcome his fear. Or he can simply direct
his attention in a more focused way to the attractiveness of the goods he
seeks and in this way sidestep the fear: he remembers the adrenalin rush
as the wheel is spun; he thinks about the friendships he might make; he
dreams of a life of risk, rebellion, and recklessness and curses his com-
muter-belt mediocrity. These goods might attract him more than financial
security. By concentrating on them he avoids facing the fear of financial
ruin.
Let us say that he decides to gamble. The goods he now seeks (excite-
ment, friendship, rebellion) are also natural attractions caused by concu-
piscence: Aquinas doesn’t say that when we change our goals the will pulls
us away from our own natural desire. He writes elsewhere that “the man
who yields to concupiscence acts counter to that which he purposed at
first, but not counter to that which he wants now.”84 Yet by choosing his
new goal the gambler determines for himself what his good will be and
which identity will be formed. Sheep don’t do all this. In Aquinas’s scheme
the sheep represents those who are sincere for Sartre: those who want to
define themselves and their possibilities in terms of an unchanging nature
that would determine everything they did.
Some interpretations of Aquinas emphasize the naturalness of human
desires and underplay the responsibility we have to choose between them
and decide our individual goals. Anthony Lisska, commenting on Aqui-
nas’s teleology, writes the following:
An end is to be attained, not because of a subjective desire or wish on the part
of the agent, but because the end itself determines the well-functioning of the
human person. [.....] Nature has “determined,” as it were, the ends which lead
to the well-being of the individuals of the natural kind. “To have been deter-
mined,” however, means only that these particular ends are part of the develop-
ment of the individual’s essence.85

Aquinas would agree that possible ends are determined by nature (by con-
cupiscence, etc.), but he would add that the choice of one end from among
many is not determined by nature. Even those passages where he writes

84. ST I-II.6:7ad2.
85. Anthony J. Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 107.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 87

about natural and universal human ends need to be read very carefully. In
De malo 6c, for example, Aquinas distinguishes between habits and pas-
sions over which the will has some control, such as anger, and natural dis-
positions that are not subject to the will. If something appears good and
suitable because of a natural disposition, then “the will prefers it from nat-
ural necessity [ex necessitate naturali voluntas preeliget illud], as all human
beings naturally desire to be, to live, and to know.”86 But even these natu-
ral and universal goods do not move the will to choose them necessarily,
since—as Aquinas explains just a few lines before—apart from the good of
happiness, any good is capable of seeming less attractive when placed next
to another good, either because the reason judges that the other good is
objectively better, or simply because the person is enticed by thoughts that
make the other good seem more attractive.87
Sartre gives a notable description of the human act: “The act is always
beyond the essence; it is a human act only in so far as it surpasses every
explanation which we can give of it.”88 Aquinas would support this de-
scription insofar as Sartre means that the natural explanation of the attrac-
tiveness of alternative goods (as determined by the sensitive appetite) will
never be enough to explain why someone chooses one good rather than
another (through the rational appetite).
Another of Sartre’s examples can be read through the eyes of Aquinas.
A young man whose brother has recently been killed in the German of-
fensive is living in occupied France during the Second World War. He has
to make a choice: he can stay in France in order to care for his bereaved
mother or flee to England to join the Free French Forces.89 There are thus
two different ends (supporting a parent or fighting for one’s country) with
two different value systems (filial piety or patriotism). How does he de-
cide? He speaks a particular language, he lives in a particular country with
a particular culture, he has this character and this personal history, he has
these strengths and weaknesses and aptitudes and preferences. It is tempt-
ing to say that his decision will be determined by all these factors. He is

86. DM 6c [470–72].
87. DM 6c [441–67].
88. BN 35; EN 70/72.
89. Jean-Paul Sartre, ”Existentialism and Humanism,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings,
ed. Stephen Priest (London: Routledge, 2001), 33–34.
88 = h u m a n b e i n g

this person in these circumstances and therefore he will act in this way.
Aquinas recognizes this appeal to an essential, natural identity and quotes
Aristotle against himself in an objection to the possibility of human free-
dom:
Just as each one is, such does the end seem to him. But what kind of being we have
is not in our power [non est in potestate nostra aliquales esse], for this comes
to us from nature. Therefore it is natural to us to follow some particular end.
Therefore it is not because of freedom [Non ergo ex libero arbitrio].90

Aquinas agrees that we naturally desire our last end, in general, but in his
response to this objection he adds:
On the part of the body and its powers human beings may be such by virtue of a
natural quality, inasmuch as we are of such a temperament or disposition due to
any impression whatever produced by corporeal causes, which cannot affect the
intellectual part, since it is not the act of a corporeal organ. And such as we are
by virtue of a corporeal quality, such also does our end seem to us, because from
such a disposition a human being is inclined to choose or reject something. But
these inclinations are subject to the judgment of reason [Sed istae inclinationes
subjacent judicio rationis], which the lower appetite obeys, as we have said [cf.
ST I.81:3]. Wherefore this is in no way prejudicial to freedom [Unde per hoc lib-
ertati arbitrii non praejudicatur].91

So the many sensitive inclinations that arise from our nature and direct
us to certain goals do not cause us to act. It is reason that will determine
which goals we actually seek. We can apply this to our example. The young
Frenchman does have an identity. There are many defining features about
his life that make him who he is and motivate his actions. Yet this identity
does not help him determine what he will become in the future. He can’t
find the answer by looking into the person he thinks he is. He can con-
sider different things in the light of different ends. In this case he oscil-
lates between two types of thinking. He is attracted to both goals and he
recognizes that his identity could be defined in terms of either one. He
thinks about the needs of his country, then about the needs of his depen-

90. ST I.83:1obj5. Citing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 3:5, 1114b1. For an English version,
see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 69.
91. ST I.83:1ad5.
 i d e n t i t y i n a q u i n a s = 89

dent mother. He considers his own desire for vengeance against his oc-
cupiers, then his own love for his mother. He judges his situation in the
light of one’s duty to one’s country, then in the light of one’s duty to one’s
parents. His intellect is free to hold both options simultaneously in mind,
because they are both “abstract” possibilities that go beyond the immedi-
ate uninterpreted information he has from his sensitive apprehension. His
particular circumstances, in other words, do not trap him within a single
way of understanding those circumstances. The young man knows that his
future will depend on which good he chooses. His actions will depend on
which end he allows to become the object of his attention and the guid-
ing principle of his life. But a theoretical goal only becomes an actual goal
when he allows it to guide his thinking and when he allows himself to be-
come the person who is formed by this goal.
This example shows us that the facts of our life and nature do not fur-
nish us with a single scale of values against which we can make every de-
cision. Ethics is more than psychology, morality more than metaphysics.92
We have to acknowledge that our identity is insufficient and surpass it to-
ward a new one. We will only exist as acting persons through the end that
we set. Our actions depend on this unfolding identity and not on some
preestablished essence.
For Aquinas, we are fulfilled by what we choose to seek. We are what
we rationally desire. Our rational desire not only fulfills what we already
are, it also creates new possibilities for who we can become. We can change
the person we are, or it might be better to say that personhood lies in the
fact that we don’t have to be any particular person. We constitute ourselves
as persons through freely chosen human action, even though we are con-
stituted by other things in so many other ways (as we will see in chapter 6).
For Aquinas, human beings are becoming what they are not, and this be-
coming is not determined by what they are. The future comes to exist, in
some way, in their present, through their decision to orientate themselves
to this particular future. Our being as persons, our personal identity, de-
pends on a future that does not exist and which cannot be extrapolated
with any necessity from the present. Our being, in this sense, echoing Sar-

92. A fierce criticism of moral theories that claim to be based on a certain metaphysics of
human nature can be found in John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1980).
90 = h u m a n b e i n g

tre, depends on nonbeing. It is created by our willingness to project one

future in preference to a number of other possible futures.
Human identity, according to the arguments presented in this chapter,
thus has two aspects. We are what we understand (through the intellect)
and we are becoming what we decide to seek (through the will). Without
this understanding our intellects would be blank and without this seeking
our wills would be inert. In these ways Aquinas’s account of human iden-
tity is very close to Sartre’s.
 Part Two

H u ma n U n d e r s ta n d i n g
 Chapter 3

T h e S u b j e c t i v e N at u r e of O b j e c t i v e
U n d e r s ta n d i n g i n S a r t r e

Being-in-the-World
In part one we explored the way human identity is constituted
by the practical choices human beings make. In part three we
will look more closely at how these choices are freely made.
Here in part two we need to address a question that arises from
the ideas developed so far. There have been hints in the previ-
ous two chapters that our personal commitments color the way
we see the world, and that we only understand things in the
way that we want to understand them. Sartre’s being-for-itself
and Aquinas’s will seem to influence the way we interpret our-
selves and our circumstances. There seems to be a suggestion
that knowledge is subjective and that we can never grasp the
truth of things as they are in themselves. If this is the case, then
the choices we make will lack any objective foundation. Hu-
man beings make decisions about things, and if our perception
of these things itself depends on our decisions, then the whole
process will be hopelessly circular. Freedom will be a hollow
kind of creativity without any external points of reference. Hu-
man life, cut off from any roots in objective reality, will just be
a self-fulfilling fantasy, and a lonely one at that. So here in part
two we ask this question: How do Sartre and Aquinas maintain
that our understanding of the world is objective when it be-
longs to a human subject and when it in some way depends on
this human subject?

93
94 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

Sartre is convinced that there are no neutral facts about the world. Ev-
erything we experience is understood in terms of ourselves, our perspec-
tives, and our goals. This humanizing of the world, however, is paradoxi-
cally what allows the reality of the world to be revealed, since the world
can only be known if it is placed in a particular perspective. One notion
of objectivity (detached, inhuman, universal) is replaced by another (en-
gaged, human, specific). Objective truth, to put it another way, is not end-
lessly deferred and out of reach, it is continually discovered within the irre-
deemably subjective activities of human beings. This subjective objectivity
ensures that human decisions are based on an understanding of the world
as it is and not just as we want it to be. Freedom and “facticity” are insepa-
rable, and the concerns of both idealism and realism need to be taken into
account if philosophy is to give a faithful account of human experience.
If we want to appreciate the theoretical framework that makes sense of
this we will have to return to the opening sections of Being and Nothing-
ness. Sartre is trying to develop a phenomenological ontology. This means
that the foundation of his philosophy is concrete human experience. He
tries to make no assumptions about what lies “behind” this experience.
He wants to keep his focus on the experience and see what is happening
within it. Metaphysics may concern itself with why this experience arose
in the first place, what are its causes and grounds, but phenomenological
ontology stays within the experience itself.
Human experience is, nevertheless, complex—it cannot be described
in terms of a single principle.1 In the introduction to Being and Nothing-
ness Sartre scrutinizes our experience of phenomena in general, without
alluding to concrete human behavior, and finds that it must refer to the
correlative regions of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. We have touched
on these ideas in chapter 1. The unified, concrete experience we have is
“the relation” of these two “regions of being.”2 It is an “original bursting-
forth [un jaillissement primitif ]” which can’t be reduced to anything more
primary.3 Being-for-itself represents that aspect of openness to what is ex-
perienced. Being-in-itself represents that aspect of openness to what is ex-
perienced.

1. See BN xxxvi–xliii; EN 26–33/27–34. 2. BN 4; EN 38/38.

3. BN 4; EN 38/38.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 95
Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence
is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness comes
about directed towards a being which is not itself.4

If we try to divorce these two regions from each other, we will lose touch
with them both. On the one hand, we never actually experience being-in-
itself isolated from all human context and cut off from any relationship
with us. What we experience is the phenomenon of this being, its place
within experience, its status as meaningful. On the other hand, we are
never directly conscious of our being-for-itself, we are only conscious of
our consciousness of other things, and in this way we are implicitly con-
scious that this consciousness is ours.
In the body of Being and Nothingness (part 1 onward) Sartre builds on
this highly abstract framework. He develops a term inherited from Hei-
degger and describes lived experience in terms of our être-dans-le-monde,
our “being-in-the-world.” We cannot experience being-in-itself, we can
only experience being as it appears to consciousness, being-as-it-is-in-the-
human-world, being as it is structured by our actions and our projects.
Nor can we experience our own consciousness in isolation from a con-
sciousness of something. The concrete world is the place where we start
and where we actually exist. It is not a construction pieced together from
two originally separate elements (a “pure” being-in-itself and a “pure” hu-
man consciousness), it is rather an original synthesis. We start by being-
in-the-world, and then we may speculate about the regions of being that
support this—our own being-for-itself and the being-in-itself of things.
The lived experience of acting human beings, which takes place in the
world, is the main subject of Being and Nothingness. The relationship be-
tween human engagement and the apprehension of being is at the center
of Sartre’s understanding of the world. Negation, for Sartre, is the consti-
tutive way in which things are revealed since they only take their place in
the world when we isolate them, go beyond them, and relate them to what
they are not. The world is the rising up of engaged human beings, the ne-
gation of being-in-itself by being-for-itself.
Sartre approaches this issue from different directions. He has a central
insight that is expressed in different ways: the world is human; objectivity

4. BN xxxvii; EN 28/28.
96 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

is revealed through subjective purposes; being-for-itself reveals being-in-

itself. In the course of Being and Nothingness he spirals around this insight,
illustrating it with reference to different aspects of human experience. In
each case Sartre tries to draw out the necessary subjective and objective el-
ement within experience, sometimes emphasizing one, then the other, but
always referring to the original synthesis that constitutes our being-in-the-
world. In this chapter I will describe some of these approaches in an unsys-
tematic way, touching on perception, instrumentality and purpose, bodily
perspective, and objective resistance. These different examples all illustrate
the way that knowledge is human. One should bear in mind throughout
this chapter that objects and things are not just physical objects but any
unities that can become “objects” of our attention: events, deeds, groups,
cultures, languages, properties, ideas, etc. So Sartre’s theory provides a way
of understanding how we constitute this human reality in many different
contexts.

The Subjective Nature of Perception

Sartre was uneasy about theories of perception that overemphasized the
role played by the intellect in the constitution of objects—he thought they
were too influenced by idealist presuppositions. He was attracted to the ge-
stalt school of psychology because it provided a corrective to these theo-
ries.5 The gestaltists believed that we identify many objects in the world
naturally and without learning.6 They did not deny that learning affects the
structures of our perceptual experience, but they said that perception is
nevertheless based on an apprehension and categorization of objects that
precedes the learning. Gestaltism was for its initiators and for Sartre a way
of defending some form of philosophical realism. The segregation of visual
things, wrote Wolfgang Köhler, is independent of meaning, and many ob-
jects and even complex figures (like some stellar constellations) are appre-
hended naturally, spontaneously, and universally.7 They have a “constancy”
because of their intrinsic unity and not solely because of the unifying judg-
ments made by human beings. Köhler didn’t deny that human understand-

5. For these various influences, see Adrian Mirvish, “Sartre on Perception and the World,”
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 14 (1983).
6. The German word Gestalt is roughly equivalent to the English form or shape.
7. See Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern
Psychology (New York: Liveright, 1947), esp. 136–72.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 97

ing depends on the meanings we give to things through our purposes, but
he wrote that “meaning follows the lines drawn by natural organization.”8
So Sartre embraced “gestaltism” as a way of affirming the givenness
and otherness of the world. We find objects, it argues, as they are. He does
not, however, allow that these natural “figures” can be apprehended or un-
derstood outside the context of human choosing. The being (in-itself) of
each figure does not depend on the choice of the for-itself, but this being
is only encountered and revealed by the isolating power of the for-itself.
We could express it in this way: We find what is there, yet it is only there
through our finding.
Sartre argues that perceptual judgments depend in part on the direc-
tion of one’s interest and attention. Choice has a role in the simplest act of
perception. We choose to look at one thing rather than another, and dif-
ferent people looking in the same direction see different things. Each per-
ceived thing has to be isolated from the undifferentiated perceptive field
and viewed against it.9
In perception there is always the construction of a figure [une forme] on a back-
ground [un fond]. No one object, no group of objects is especially designed to
be organised as specifically either ground or figure; all depends on the direction
of my attention.10

A constitutive aspect of something being there for us is that we have cho-

sen to be interested in it. “In perception we constitute a particular object
as a figure by rejecting another so as to make of it a background, and the
other way round.”11 There is never a “figure” without this aspect of human
selection. The world is what we actively uncover. This formal scheme is not
just applicable to the perception of physical objects; it also applies to the
perception of properties within a single object. We have to decide, for ex-
ample, to attend to the weight or to the color or to the texture of a thing.
“While I cannot make this fruit peel cease being green, it is I who am re-
sponsible for my taking it as a rough green or a green roughness.”12
There is, therefore, a subjective and an objective element to every per-
ception, and the one requires the other instead of undermining it. The ob-

8. Ibid., 139. 9. BN 316; EN 356/380.

10. BN 9; EN 44/44. 11. BN 20; EN 55/56.
12. BN 188; EN 224/238.
98 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

jective form is lit up by the subjective attention, and the subject can only
attend to what is there. Sartre writes very simply that the relationship any
particular thing has with its background is “both chosen and given.”13 On
the one hand, we choose without any necessity to notice this thing, in the
pursuit of our interests, and to see it in relation to its background. “I am
free to look at the book on the table or at the table supporting the book.”14
On the other hand, the givenness comes from the relationship that things
really have with each other. We can’t change the “original distribution of
thises [distribution originelle des ceci]” that make up the world.15 It is an
unavoidable fact that at this moment the book and the table have a specific
relationship with each other. The decision to attend to one or the other of
these objects is only possible because of this original givenness.
There is a certain ambiguity here, and a number of questions remain
hanging: Are there any “natural” or universally acknowledged figures
whose emergence does not depend on the interests of particular individu-
als or groups? Do the figures exist as figures before the choice made? Sartre
is pulled in two directions. First, he is taking the side of realism and fighting
against the idealistic notion that things are constituted solely in terms of the
cognitive structures of the human subject.16 Second, he nevertheless wants
to affirm that perception and understanding are unavoidably human.

Instrumentality and Purpose

Why do we choose to notice one thing rather than another? Sartre says
that it is because a thing is useful.17 This does not mean, in a crude way,
that we only perceive and understand things when we want to make im-

13. BN 316; EN 356/380.

14. BN 317; EN 356/380.
15. BN 316–17; EN 356/380.
16. He had been hostile to idealism ever since encountering it in some of the teaching at
the École Normale Supérieur. He went on to believe that Husserl’s whole phenomenological
project was threatened by an unacknowledged idealism.
17. The thought of Husserl as much as Heidegger hovers in the background here. Husserl
writes that in the natural attitude we find not only factual things but things with values and
uses. These uses are not just additional characteristics we impose onto neutral facts. “Imme-
diately, physical things stand there as Objects of use, the ‘table’ with its ‘books,’ the ‘drinking
glass,’ the ‘vase,’ the ‘piano,’ etc. These value characteristics and practical characteristics also be-
long constitutively to the Objects ‘on hand’ as Objects, regardless of whether or not I turn to such
characteristics and the Objects”; see Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenol-
ogy and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Book 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenol-
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 99

mediate practical use of them. It means that our broadest values and pur-
poses define the kind of objects we give our attention to. Our purpose may
simply be to understand something, or to contemplate something, or to
honor something, or to move past something—but we have to have at least
some reason for relating to it, some value we assign to our interaction with
it. There is a reciprocal relationship between human desire and the instru-
mentality we attribute to things.18 Sartre’s examples here are more con-
nected with sense perception and practical purposes, but he is making the
wider point that any kind of knowledge or understanding must be related
to some particular purpose, and ultimately to some overarching project—
even if that purpose is aesthetic contemplation or a desire to satisfy one’s
intellectual curiosity.
When Sartre writes that objects are revealed to us in “a complex of in-
strumentality [un complexe d’ustensilité],”19 he means that we only iden-
tify and understand something properly when we see how it works, how
it functions, how it fits into the dynamic context in which it is situated.
Things have a place in an active, unfolding world and not just in an ab-
stract map of sensible objects. The instrumental place that things occupy
only becomes apparent if we have some purposeful involvement in the
world. “Sense perception is in no way to be distinguished from the practi-
cal organization of existents into a world.”20 Everything refers, directly or
indirectly, to our purposes and so to ourselves as the center of these pur-
poses. There is always some relationship, however indirect, between what
things are and what we do; and there is always some relationship between
what we do and what we want.
Sartre puts it in this way: The place each thing has “is not defined by

ogy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 53. On the Heideggerian notion of equipment
(das Zeug: instrument, tool, gear), see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Mac-
quarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 95–102, and translators’ footnote 1 on
97. The “readiness-to-hand” of an instrument cannot be discovered by looking “theoretically,”
we have to look with the sight of “circumspection” (looking around for something) and notice
what purpose the instrument is for. See BN 200; EN 236–37/250–51.
18. It’s important to be aware that the language of “instrumentalism” has particular nega-
tive connotations for some contemporary philosophers. Charles Taylor, for example, uses it to
refer to the loss of meaning and values that can occur in technocratic, consumerist societies.
Sartre intends something different. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 499–513.
19. BN 321; EN 361/385.
20. BN 321; EN 361/385.
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pure spatial co-ordinates but in relation to axes of practical reference.”21

Thus our own activity determines the things we choose to find and also the
way we understand them. To understand something, in whatever way, is to
place it within axes of practical reference, in a context of meaning that is
related to human interests and purposes. This doesn’t imply that we simply
create meaning or impose it onto a meaningless situation; it implies that
meaning is only allowed to emerge once we are personally involved in a
situation. Sartre gives two everyday examples.22 First, we notice that a glass
sits on the coffee table. Why do we notice this? It is not just a random sense
perception. There are many other things we could notice now instead, and
at other times in the past we did not notice the glass. In this case, for ex-
ample, we want to move the table and are brought to consider what is on it
so we don’t break anything. Our perception of the glass is inseparable from
our interest in moving the table. The glass is something we have to be care-
ful with, it has a place in our practical purposes—even if we never actually
move the table. Second, we spot the tobacco pouch on the mantlepiece.
Why do we spot it? Because we want to smoke. Our apprehension of the
location of the tobacco is inseparable from our desire for it. The tobacco is
something we desire, it has a place in our practical purposes—even if we
do not actually get round to retrieving it.
It may seem that Sartre is creating a big muddle of perception and pur-
pose, of objective description and subjective meaning. Numerous objec-
tions spring to mind: Surely the glass is on the coffee table even if we are
not interested in it? Surely other people may have different interests that
bring this same fact to their attention? Surely the same truth can be de-
scribed in objective terms without reference to human interests? The an-
swer to all these questions is “Yes”; but this doesn’t undermine Sartre’s cen-
tral contention that we only notice things in the first place if we have at
least some interest in them. There are innumerable things to observe in any
landscape, and our interests always determine what we find. In another
passage Sartre summarizes his understanding in the following phrase: “In
a word, the world gives counsel only if one questions it, and one can ques-
tion it only for a well determined end.”23
We can imagine another example.24 Some people walk together through

21. BN 321; EN 361/385. 22. BN 321; EN 361/385.

23. BN 448; EN 492/524. 24. This is mine, not Sartre’s.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 101

a forest. They follow the same path at the same time, yet only one hears the
birdsong, only one sees the snakes, only one smells the flowers. They have
different fears, loves, instincts, hobbies, professions, etc., and these influ-
ence their perception. Even the “neutral” scientists in the group, who claim
to have a greater objectivity, have chosen their own particular object of in-
quiry, be it the humidity, the temperature, or the river formation. And if the
attention of all these people happens to converge on a single thing—say a
scream from the other side of the river, or a tree fallen across their path—
this convergence is inseparable from a convergence of their personal inter-
ests, and as soon as that interest wanes they will attend to other things. The
members of this party even notice different “things” about the same “thing.”
An animal darts in front of them and they notice its color or speed or size
or ferocity. There are innumerable properties to observe in any thing, and
our interests always determine which we attend to. As soon as things are
stripped of the meanings and references that purposeful human beings
have given them, they vanish into abstraction. Our interest is like a light
that illuminates things.25 The light is not what it illuminates, yet nothing
can appear without it.
Sartre returns to this relationship between objective fact and subjective
purpose in a later section of Being and Nothingness entitled “My Place.”26
Here, aided by his discussions of freedom, Sartre admits that there is an
“antimony.” On the one hand, “human-reality originally receives its place
[place] in the midst of things”—we find ourselves to be in a certain place
and we have to accept that. On the other hand, “human-reality is that by
which something such as place comes to things”—we give structure to an
otherwise chaotic collection of things and organize them into a place by
determining what they mean for us. In Sartre’s use of the term there can-
not be an abstract, nonhuman place, yet we “receive” our place without
manipulating the things we find.27
His response to this antinomy is not so much to offer a resolution as to
reinforce the necessity of this double truth. He revisits earlier arguments
and shows how there is never a pure contemplation of objects or a disin-

25. Joseph Fell applies this metaphor to Sartre’s account of instrumentality; see Joseph P.
Fell, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place (New York: Columbia University Press,
1979), 74.
26. BN 489–96; EN 535–41/570–76.
27. BN 491; EN 536/571.
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terested apprehension of data. Being there in that place is, for example, be-
ing near to something we remember or far from someone we love; being
there is being able to reach the teapot or read in the light from the win-
dow; being there is waiting for my discharge from the army in a hundred
and ten days; being there is being hidden from my enemies. These per-
spectives involved in “being there” are not additional meanings we give
to a situation after we have cast a neutral eye over the landscape, they are
part of the original data. Every aspect of place and time and environment
and situation is somehow conditioned by the way we exist beyond being,
by our freely chosen attitudes and plans and goals. “The future—a thrown-
forward future [un futur pro-jeté]—intervenes everywhere.”28
Try as we may to disentangle some independent data from our own
purposeful schemes, we always fail. What we are really doing is replac-
ing one human scheme with another. Sartre doesn’t mention the example
of science here, but one can see how even the movement to so-called sci-
entific objectivity (detached, uninfluenced by human need) is actually the
substitution of a more universal, more widely known purposeful scheme
for that of an individual or local one. To observe, for example, how light
reacts in an experiment reproduced in different laboratories throughout
the world is still to understand light in a perspective of human purposes.
There are reasons why these people are interested in light, why they exper-
iment in this way, why they notate their results in this technical language
and not another one, etc., and these reasons reflect their individual and
communal purposes. This does not in any way undermine the utility of the
scientific project, it simply reveals its true nature—which is to understand
the world in the light of a particular collective human purpose. There is
no neutral space where people act in a premoral way, there is no practical
thinking that avoids the question of purpose and the good. There are no
facts without values.29

28. BN 493; EN 538/574.

29. The philosophical difficulty is not the much debated one of how to get an “ought” from
an “is,” the real difficulty lies in trying to separate an “is” from an “ought.” One’s understand-
ing of what is can never be separated from the values that drive one to understand. Our inter-
est in truth, speculative as well as practical, is always intertwined with our understanding of
what is good for us.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 103

The Perspective of the Body

If human purposes give a certain perspective to experience, a much more
literal kind of perspective comes from our nature as bodily creatures. In
part 3, chapter 2, of Being and Nothingness, entitled “The Body,” Sartre
mounts an attack on what he calls “absolute objectivity” (objectivité ab-
solue). He recalls his earlier conclusion that consciousness is conscious-
ness of the world: We are aware that we are present to a world that is other
than us. This might seem to provide the basis for an unqualified realism.
Sartre adds, however, that the world we are conscious of is always under-
stood from a certain perspective, from the point of view of an observer.30
He does not say that things cease to exist when they are no longer placed
in this perspective. He simply says that to have any understanding of their
existence (as observed or not) there must be a specific point of view built
into this understanding.
Consciousness does not fly over the world without perspective and
contemplate it without a point of view. Each thing we observe has a spe-
cific orientation to a concrete reference point.31 The glass is on the left or
the right of the decanter depending on where the observer is sitting, and it
is impossible to have any notion of position without referring to an obser-
vation point. Orientation “is a constitutive structure of the thing.”32 Even
the most abstract spatial grid must somehow be rooted in the particular
features of what is being surveyed. Without a point of view (on her right,
on his left) nothing would remain, there would be “the total disappearance
of thises at the heart of an original indistinction [l’évanouissement total des
ceci au sein d’une indistinction primitive].”33 Knowledge, thought, and lan-
guage are situated, and there is always a context to our descriptions and
our speaking.
Science may try and take an “abstract point of view,”34 but for Sartre this
is a contradiction in terms. The attempt to reach “absolute objectivity”35

30. The language of “perspective” recalls the perspectivism of Nietzsche and Ortega y Gas-
set. Frederick Olafson compares Sartre’s version of perspectivism with William James’s prag-
matism; see Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existen-
tialism (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1967), 48–49.
31. BN 306–7; EN 345–46/368–70. 32. BN 316; EN 356/380.
33. BN 306; EN 346/369. 34. BN 307; EN 346/369.
35. BN 307; EN 346/369.
104 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

proves self-defeating. When things are described solely in terms of abstract

characteristics and relations they drift free from reality and become merely
formal representations. Scientific units of measurement (such as the mea-
surement of speed) have to refer somehow to objects with specific dimen-
sions, otherwise they have no meaning. Something moves in relation to a
body of a given dimension.36 Only the human being can specify these di-
mensions. If this world is to be understood it must be a world seen from a
point of view by someone in particular—even if that someone is a scien-
tist who can invite others to share this point of view. Sartre was pleased to
discover that physicists such as Louis de Broglie and Werner Heisenberg
were seeking to “reintegrate the observer into the heart of the scientific
system.”37
Human beings and the world are relative beings, “and the principle
of their being is the relation.”38 To come into existence for me “is to un-
fold my distances from things and thereby to cause there to be things. But
consequently things are precisely ‘things-which-exist-at-a-distance-from-
me.’ ”39 Without these relations and concrete distances there could be no
world to experience or speak about.40 There is only a world in relation to
situated and acting human beings.
The point of view of pure knowledge is contradictory; there is only the point of
view of engaged [engagée] knowledge. This amounts to saying that knowledge
and action are only two abstract aspects of an original, concrete relation.41

“Knowledge,” here, refers to the comprehensive way we understand and

experience the world, and not just to the knowledge of the scientist or the
logician. On the one hand, “It is absolutely necessary that the world appear
to me in order.” On the other hand, “It is wholly contingent that it should
be this order.”42 Thus the world appears “as the necessary and totally unjus-

36. BN 307–8; EN 347/370. 37. BN 307; EN 346/370.

38. BN 308; EN 347/370. 39. BN 308; EN 347/370.
40. We exist, of course, in relation to other human beings, and we exist (first as children)
in relation to their projects before we begin our own. Sartre doesn’t discuss properly the social
and cultural nature of human formation until part 3 (chapter 3) and part 4 of BN.
41. BN 308; EN 347/370.
42. Sartre does not mean that we can choose any order. We can’t, for example, choose the
submolecular order if we have no electron microscopes, or the Chinese cultural order if we
only speak English. He simply means that whenever we do choose an order (from those avail-
able to us), this particular order is not necessitated by the world.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 105

tifiable arrangement of the totality of beings [comme agencement nécessaire

et injustifiable de la totalité des êtres].”43 So things in the world have to ap-
pear in some particular perspective, and perspective as such is necessary.
Yet the particular arrangement (agencement) that emerges depends for its
form entirely on which perspective a particular human being happens to
take on the world. It is contingent, not necessary. It is unjustifiable, in the
sense that nothing in the world justifies the choice of this contingent per-
spective over another. “It is necessary that the book appear to me on the
right or on the left side of the table. But it is contingent that the book ap-
pears to me specifically on the left”—because I could change my position
and instead see it on the right.44
What is the bodily subject? Where do we ourselves fit into this order of
things? What perspective can be taken on the one who gives the perspec-
tive? Sartre’s answer is that we cannot be objects within this order, instead
we are this ordering. “It is absolutely necessary that the world appear to me
in order. And in this sense this order is me [cet ordre c’est moi].”45 This is a
difficult concept to grasp. Sartre takes the example of human sensation and
shows that in our own personal experience we are never aware of a sense
sensing a sensation. We sense objects in the world, and we do not, for ex-
ample, observe our own eye seeing visible sensations. The eye is the point
where the visual lines of perspective meet.
Thus the perceptive field refers to a center objectively defined by that reference
and located in the very field that is oriented around it. Only we do not see this
center as the structure of the perceptive field considered; we are the center. Thus
the order of the objects in the world perpetually refers us to the image of an object
which on principle can not be an object for us since it is what we have to be.46

This object that we are is “the contingent upsurge of one orientation among
the infinite possibilities of orienting the world.”47 The specific orientation
of my world indicates a center that is myself. Sartre calls both the orien-
tation of the world and the center of orientation my body, and concludes
that my body is both coextensive with the world and at the same time “con-
densed into this single point which all things indicate.”48

43. BN 309; EN 348/371. 44. BN 317; EN 356/380.

45. BN 309; EN 348/371. 46. BN 317; EN 357/381.
47. BN 317; EN 357/381. 48. BN 318; EN 358/382.
106 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

The implications of this will become apparent as this chapter develops.

A human life is not something in addition to the ordering of this world—it
is the fact that the world is ordered in this particular way at this moment.
What makes a human being this human being (and not another) is the fact
that the things of this world are seen in this distinctive way (and not an-
other). A human life can’t be separated from the world. To exist as a hu-
man being is to “allow” the world to exist in a particular form. One’s exis-
tence is, for example, the room observed from this angle, the noises from
the street heard in this way, the conversation understood in this manner,
the pain felt to this degree. The uniqueness of the person depends on the
uniqueness of the perspective, and there is no disembodied human exis-
tence apart from this perspective. A human being does not have a perspec-
tive, a human being is this perspective. The corresponding truth, already
discussed, is that each thing in the world cannot be abstracted from its
place in the order we bring.
It bears repeating that this does not mean that things cease to ex-
ist when we cease to observe them, or that we are incapable of imagin-
ing things in different situations, or that we cannot communicate things
to other people with a different perspective. It simply means that the very
notions of continuing existence or imagination or communication require
a concrete perspective. The decentering of my world, for example, which
takes place when I realize that I am an object for another person’s subjec-
tivity, is always a recentering around the concrete perspective brought by
this other person.49 The public perspectives given to me when I enter a city
(street signs, price tags, etc.) still have to be appropriated by me in order
to become meaningful: I make my perspective fit with the perspective of
the social order.50 Perspective is a constitutive part of each thing. There is
nothing in our world that does not have a concrete relation to a living, act-
ing, seeking human being. There are many other relations between things
that we can’t understand, but at present these are closed to us. We can’t
even imagine such relations without imagining them in the perspective of
our world.

49. See BN 254–56; EN 293–95/311–13.

50. See BN 509–12; EN 554–57/591–94.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 107

The Objective Resistance of the World

The fact that we bring a human perspective to the world does not mean
that we can interpret the facts of experience in any way that we choose.
Our purposes may determine which things we are interested in, but it is
the things themselves that determine whether our purposes can be ful-
filled. Sartre explains this aspect of objectivity in terms of the resistance of-
fered to our projects by the world. In his descriptions of resistance Sartre
was deeply influenced by Gaston Bachelard and Max Scheler.51 Bachelard
criticized the phenomenologists for exaggerating the role played by the in-
tellect in human experience. Intentionality, according to Bachelard, is not
just about our intellectual relationship with known things, it is about the
multifarious ways in which we interact with the world. There is a dynamic
and a material “intention” through which we meet objects in their force,
their resistance, their materiality.52 Scheler places cognition in the con-
text of the “lived body” and shows how it is constantly meeting resistance
from its material environment.53 For both these philosophers human be-
ings have to apply force to their environment, they have to be sufficiently
“offensive,” in order to get to grips with the world and see how it reacts.
Sartre develops this theme of resistance and writes that things have
a “coefficient of adversity” that cannot be avoided.54 At the same time he
wants to show that objective resistance itself is only discovered and in-
terpreted through our free projects. Without our subjective involvement
there would be nothing to notice. The coefficient of adversity in things is
only met because of our desire for certain ends. In itself, this large rock
formation is neutral, there is nothing about it that can help or hinder our
lives. Only when we think about climbing it do we realize how impossible
this is: the rock is revealed as “too difficult to climb” only because we ques-
tioned whether it was “climbable.”
Thus although brute things (what Heidegger calls “brute existents”) can from
the start limit our freedom of action, it is our freedom itself that must first con-

51. For their views and their influence on Sartre, see Mirvish, “Sartre on Perception and
the World.”
52. BN 324 and footnote 3; EN 364/388 and footnote 1.
53. Sartre refers to Scheler at BN 330; EN 370/395.
54. BN 481; EN 527/561. Sartre borrows Bachelard’s term.
108 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g
stitute the framework, the technique, and the ends in relation to which they will
manifest themselves as limits.55

Sartre is careful not to say that our free action constitutes the things
themselves or their limits. Instead it constitutes the framework, the tech-
nique, and the ends (le cadre, la technique et les fins) through which the
limits are revealed. A “technique” is the particular type of human endeavor
or cultural practice in which someone is involved. So here the difficulty of
the rock is only revealed because those dedicated to climbing (which is the
framework) want to scale the rock (to achieve this end) using their skills
and climbing equipment (which is their technique). In itself, the notion of
“difficulty” is meaningless, yet when we seek to climb the rock it reveals
itself “as it is (i.e., resisting or favorable).”56 There is no contradiction be-
tween creativity and discovery: each requires the other. “There is no obsta-
cle in an absolute sense, but the obstacle reveals its coefficient of adversity
across freely invented and freely acquired techniques.”57
Despite these nuanced passages about the resistance we meet when we
engage with the world, Merleau-Ponty still believed that Sartre gave too
little weight to the objective reality of the world and to our concrete being.
It is worth examining some of his criticisms in order to appreciate what
Sartre was really doing. Merleau-Ponty accepted that the central thesis of
intentionality was meant to preserve phenomenology from idealism. The
subject is not trapped within the structures of the mind since conscious-
ness is transparent to what is other than itself. But he drew attention very
early on to some dangers inherent in Sartre’s notion of transparency.58
Merleau-Ponty believed that Sartre held to a kind of Cartesian dualism
that did not allow for an “interworld”—a world between the transparent
subject and the impenetrable object, a world between one human subjec-
tivity and another.59 In this interworld things would carry a weight from
elsewhere, they would suggest and sometimes impose their own meanings.
The “flesh” of others and of the world would intrude into our compre-

55. BN 482; EN 527/562. 56. BN 488; EN 533/568.

57. BN 488; EN 533–34/569.
58. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), esp. the final section on freedom, 434–56. Merleau-Ponty re-
acts to Sartre’s ideas without mentioning him by name very often.
59. See Monika Langer, “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: A Reappraisal,” in The Philosophy of
Jean Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981), esp. 304–9.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 109

hension more forcefully than Sartre allows. Without the interworld, con-
sciousness would be rootless and isolated.
Merleau-Ponty picks up Sartre’s example of fatigue, and agrees that it
is not an objective motive that causes us to halt on a journey. We have to
decide freely to give in to it. But there is nevertheless a kind of “sedimen-
tation” of our life; some attitudes have a “favored status” and become more
“probable.”60 Freedom presupposes a situation whose meaning we have not
chosen. Two passages express this insight very clearly.
We therefore recognize, around our initiatives and around that strictly individ-
ual project which is oneself, a zone of generalized existence and of projects al-
ready formed, significances which trail between ourselves and things and which
confer on us the quality of man, bourgeois or worker.61

The choice which we make of our life is always based on a certain givenness. My
freedom can draw life away from its spontaneous course, but only by a series of
unobtrusive deflections which necessitate first of all following its course—not
by any absolute creation. [.....] I am a psychological and historical structure, and
have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and
thoughts stand in a relationship to this structure.62

These are penetrating criticisms, and if they are correct they will under-
mine Sartre’s philosophical project. The key question is this: Is the phenom-
enology of Being and Nothingness irreparably idealistic or does it already al-
low for the intrusion of an “interworld” into human consciousness?
Sartre’s answer is straightforward: There are many ways in which we
are already formed, many ways in which our actions depend on a momen-
tum and direction we have not freely given them, many occasions when
we participate without reflection in the projects of others. Yet all of these,
if they are to have any significance for us in our world, have to be given a
personal meaning in the light of our purposes and projects. We have to
make sense of them for ourselves. This is not a denial of the dense given-
ness of ourselves and of the world, it is the very way that we appropri-
ate this givenness and ensure that it does not sit unacknowledged on the
fringes of consciousness.

60. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 441.

61. Ibid., 450.
62. Ibid., 455.
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Sartre often highlights the fundamental givenness of experience. He

notes that “far from being able to modify our situation at our whim, we
seem to be unable to change ourselves.”63 A later section where Sartre is
unambiguous about the intrusion of externally formed meanings into our
personal world is called Mon prochain, “My neighbor” or “My fellow hu-
man being.” The world contains meanings I have not given it, which are
inherited and “already mine.” 64 In a city I meet an “innumerable host of
meanings which are independent of my choice”: streets, buses, directions,
warnings, sounds, etc.65 I have a factual belonging to an already meaning-
ful world. This is one manifest part of Sartre’s “interworld.” Sartre’s sole and
all important qualification is that this penetration of concrete reality into
our free subjectivity can only occur when human beings seek their own
goals in the world—it is never passive. The interworld just is, it is inert and
ineffectual, unless we live and act in it, and even the external meanings it
carries to us need appropriating and responding to.66
Sartre uses the word “exist” as a transitive verb to stand for our pur-
poseful appropriation of the concrete world we inherit. “The only posi-
tive way which I have to exist my factual belonging [exister mon apparte-
nance de fait] to these collectivities is the use which I constantly make of
the techniques which arise from them.”67 The fleshly meaning of the inter-
world itself needs to be given meaning by our freedom. Simone de Beau-
voir was right to accuse Merleau-Ponty of conflating Sartre’s notion of a
transparent, contemplative consciousness (apparent in the introduction to
Being and Nothingness) with a subject that develops, for example, in rela-
tionship with others, in the context of the world. She writes that Merleau-
Ponty neglects Sartre’s work on facticity, and doesn’t acknowledge that
for him consciousness is always incarnate.68 In the end, I believe that the
63. BN 481; EN 526/561. 64. BN 510; EN 555/592.
65. BN 510; EN 555/592.
66. Sartre recognized an interworld but did not want it to be used as an excuse for passiv-
ity. It was not just for phenomenological reasons that Sartre emphasized our need to take re-
sponsibility even for the meanings and purposes that seem to be an unavoidable part of our
fleshly existence. In an interview given a few years after BN (which was written between 1941
and 1943) he said that the war undoubtedly influenced his outlook. In Sartre’s eyes it was im-
possible not to make a fundamental decision about one’s life in occupied France. One had to
decide to resist or not to resist. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Itinerary of a Thought,” in Between
Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), esp. 34.
67. BN 512; EN 557/594.
68. Simone de Beauvoir, “Merleau-Ponty et Le Pseudo-Sartrisme,” Les Temps Modernes 10,
nos. 114–15 (1955): esp. 2074–75.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 111

views of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre on freedom are closer than Merleau-

Ponty recognized.69
The use of language provides a paradigm for this question of how we
can give personal meaning to the world even when meaning seems to be
thrust upon us, of how we can play a part in forming our world even when
we are formed by the world. Sartre briefly suggests how a philosophy of
language might be developed.70 He writes that to learn a language is to
understand and belong to a culture. In theory this could imply that we
are restricted by the language and culture, and that the personal mean-
ings we express through our use of the language are limited by the mean-
ings that are embodied in the culture. But Sartre says that the meaning of
speech depends on structured sentences and not only on words alone, and
the sentence refers us to the “speaker [discoureur] as the concrete founda-
tion of speech.”71 The reality of spoken language “is the free act of designa-
tion by which I choose myself as designating.”72 Speech is not a language
that speaks all by itself and meanings are not predetermined or limited by
the words. Speech refers us to the free intentions and overall purposes of
those who speak as they interpret and go beyond their inherited situations.
Sartre writes that this theory of speech applies to any “technique” in which
human beings are involved. It could provide a basis for a philosophy of
culture and allow one to see how new cultural and historical projects can
arise even within tightly determined structures. It also explains his well-
known opposition to structuralism.73

Knowledge Is Human
In this struggle to integrate the subjective influence of human perspective
and the objective givenness of the world Sartre is trying to integrate two
distinctive strands of phenomenology: the more personal-subjective phi-
losophy of Husserl and the more impersonal-objective philosophy of Hei-
degger. In Husserl’s phenomenology one’s first outlook on life is the natu-
ral attitude. With this initial attitude, Husserl writes, “I continually find the

69. Despite insisting that human life has its own momentum and direction, Merleau-Pon-
ty still gave the final word to freedom: “As long as we are alive, our situation is open, which im-
plies both that it calls up specially favoured modes of resolution, and also that it is powerless to
bring one into being by itself ”; see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 442.
70. BN 512–21; EN 557–65/594–603. 71. BN 515; EN 560/598.
72. BN 516; EN 561/598.
73. For further comments on this point, see chapter 5.
112 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

one spatiotemporal actuality to which I belong like all other human beings
who are to be found in it and who are related to it as I am. I find the ‘actu-
ality,’ the word already says it, as a factually existent actuality and also ac-
cept it as it presents itself to me as factually existing.” 74 This is not a world
merely of facts and affairs, it is at the same time a world of values, a world
of goods, a practical world. When we perform the epoche and “bracket”
this natural attitude we realize that these facts, values, and meanings are
dependent on the structures of understanding brought by the human sub-
ject.75 We still attend to the same “world,” to the same facts, values, and
meanings, but we no longer accept them in an unreflective way, we realize
that their force depends on their place in our subjective processes. Thomas
Busch writes that in Husserl’s epoche “objects, thus reduced to the status
of meanings for consciousness, are further grasped as constituted by the
meaning-giving acts of consciousness.”76 There are risks here which even
the most sympathetic phenomenologist such as Robert Sokolowski ac-
knowledges. This emphasis on subjective constitution leaves Husserl “with
the content of constitution as an unexplained residuum, a pure facticity
which escapes the principles of his philosophy.”77 This is why Sartre’s read-
ing of Heidegger in the late 1930s proved so timely. Heidegger’s Dasein re-
rooted him in the givenness of the world (the very givenness that attracted
him to Husserl in the first place). It gave him a corrective to Husserl’s sub-
jectivity, even though Sartre persisted quite consciously in using the more
subjective phrase réalité-humaine as a substitute for the impersonal Da-
sein.
Did Sartre’s project of integrating Husserl and Heidegger succeed? Was
he able to present a convincing picture of a subjective objectivity that pre-
serves both the human nature of experience and its objective foundations
in the world? Some commentators, such as Ronald Aronson, criticize him

74. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philoso-

phy. Book 1: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, 56–57.
75. On the epoche, see, e.g., Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to
Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960),
18–22.
76. Thomas W. Busch, “Sartre’s Use of the Reduction: Being and Nothingness Reconsid-
ered,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman
and Frederick A. Elliston (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980), 19.
77. Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague,
The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 218.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 113

for not giving enough weight to the structures of consciousness. Human

beings are too transparent to the world. “Sartre ejects into the world ev-
erything that ‘idealism’ explains through recourse to the structured activ-
ity of subjectivity. And therewith, the world becomes a moody, implacable
given.” Aronson writes that he tries in vain to remove subjective structures
from consciousness:
The for-itself negates the in-itself—presumably in regular, patterned, predict-
able ways—and so there emerges an ordered, structured world and a con-
sciousness that comprehends it. But what is this if not the hidden return of pre-
conscious constituting processes.78

In effect Sartre is accused of a naïve realism. In my own view Aronson

does not pay enough attention to the enormous part consciousness plays
for Sartre in structuring experience. Consciousness does structure the
world, but consciousness is not itself structured by prior structures—it is
the dynamic structuring of the world. The only way Sartre can avoid ide-
alism is by insisting that consciousness adds nothing to being, but reveals
what is there through negation. So the emergence of the world is wholly
dependent on the structuring of consciousness but not on its structures. If
we ask why there is this structuring, Sartre’s answer is that this just is the
particular shape given now to the world through the actions of a free hu-
man being. The structuring of human beings and their freedom to rethink
themselves and to surpass the world are one and the same reality.79
The more serious doubts about Sartre’s project come from those who
believe he failed to escape from the idealist presuppositions of Husserl’s
phenomenology. This line of criticism accuses him of importing unproven
metaphysical notions into his system in order to buttress the weaknesses of
his ontology. Sartre is charged with failing to establish the independent re-
ality of being-in-itself. This failure follows inevitably from his decision to
develop an ontology out of phenomenology. Klaus Hartmann, one of Sar-
tre’s most perceptive critics, writes that Sartre’s ontology “is unable to ac-

78. Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980),
96–97.
79. It is interesting that in his serious and wide-ranging study Aronson makes hardly any
references (only three) to part 1 of BN, “The Problem of Nothingness” (which deals with the
structuring imposed by the for-itself through negation), and not one of these references con-
cerns negation.
114 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

count for what is there per se from an objectively ontological perspective,

namely, individual things and individual persons.”80 Sartre starts within
a correlativistic epistemology where subject and object define each other
in the unity of experience, and for this reason he struggles to explain the
origin of the discreteness and individuality that negation reveals. He has
no higher ontological principles or categories (like essence or existence)
that will elucidate being-in-itself. Joseph Fell echoes these concerns.81 He
sees that the idea of being-in-itself is developed to support a kind of real-
ism against the idealism latent in Husserl. At the same time he wonders
whether Sartre has created an idealism of meaning in which all distinc-
tions lie in the realm of consciousness. To search for the extrahuman foun-
dation of differentiation is to enter the area of metaphysics, which—on the
whole—Sartre refused to do,82 even though at the end of Being and Noth-
ingness he recognized the legitimacy of metaphysical questions.83
In my opinion there is no contradiction in trying to assert the pres-
ence of two complementary principles in our experience of the world.
This is Sartre’s very limited and extremely valuable project in Being and
Nothingness. Sartre returns to this again and again, and formalizes it in a
few pages at the end of part 2 (“Being-for-itself ”). The section is entitled
“Knowledge,”84 where knowledge is used in a broad sense to indicate all
that is within the human experience of the world. Sartre tries to clarify
what his own position does and does not have in common with the philo-
sophical traditions he labels “idealist” and “realist.” He grants to idealism
that in human experience there is an unavoidable association between the
being of the world and our knowledge of this being. This is what has led
some thinkers to reduce being to a function of knowledge and therefore to
reduce the objective world to the level of a human construct. This might be
possible if we could envisage a human subject that first existed and knew

80. Klaus Hartmann, Sartre’s Ontology: A Study of Being and Nothingness in the Light of
Hegel’s Logic (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 135.
81. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place, esp. 71–81.
82. On Sartre’s occasional references to a purer, more metaphysical conception of being-
in-itself, see Thomas W. Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in
Sartre’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 23–30. Busch believes
that the very notion of the in-itself is a muddled one “because Sartre fluctuates, in presenting
the notion, between a pure phenomenological ontology and a speculative metaphysics” (23).
83. See BN 619; EN 667/713.
84. BN 216–18; EN 253–55/268–71.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n s a r t r e = 115

itself and then knew the world in relation to itself and in terms of its own
understanding. But for Sartre “the for-itself does not exist in order subse-
quently to know [le pour-soi n’est pas pour connaître ensuite].”85 There is
no human subject that has knowledge. “Knowledge is nothing other than
the presence of being to the for-itself, and the for-itself is only the noth-
ing which realizes that presence [le pour-soi n’est que le rien qui réalise cette
présence].”86 Knowing is an absolute and primitive event, “it is the absolute
upsurge of the for-itself in the midst of being and beyond being [c’est le sur-
gissement absolu du pour-soi au milieu de l’être et par delà l’être].”87
The idealist position needs reversing (and therefore abandoning). It is
more accurate to say that we, through knowledge, are absorbed in being
than to say that the being of the world is trapped within the structures of
our knowing. There is only being, and the relation of the for-itself to the
in-itself is “a fundamental ontological relation.”88 The in-itself is affirmed
through the self-negation of the for-itself. This affirmation exists only for
the for-itself, but it is not in the for-itself, since it is an ek-stase, a being
present out there. In a later passage Sartre defends what he describes as
“something like an ontological conditioning of freedom,” “a kind of on-
tological priority [une préséance ontologique] of the in-itself over the for-
itself.”89 As Sartre writes in the conclusion to Being and Nothingness, the
for-itself has no reality except that of being the negation of being, and “its
sole qualification comes to it from the fact that it is the nihilation of an in-
dividual and particular in-itself and not of a being in general.”90 The ide-
alist dilemma (how to unite world and mind) is unnecessary. “Therefore
we have no business asking about the way in which the for-itself can be
united with the in-itself since the for-itself is in no way an autonomous
substance.”91
Sartre, in this light, grants to realism that being is present to conscious-
ness in knowledge and that “the for-itself adds nothing to the in-itself ex-
cept the very fact that there is in-itself; that is, the affirmative negation.”92
Although there are many ways in which being seems to be “structured”
by human experience, they all arise through negation and none of them

85. BN 216; EN 253/268. 86. BN 216; EN 253/268.

87. BN 216; EN 253/268. 88. BN 216; EN 253/268.
89. BN 484; EN 529/564. 90. BN 618; EN 666/712.
91. BN 618; EN 666/712. 92. BN 217; EN 254/269.
116 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

“modify the pure being which is revealed through them.”93 Everything is

given; nothing of what we see comes from us. “Representation, as a psy-
chic event, is a pure invention of the philosophers.”94 Yet realism, by in-
sisting on the primacy of being, does not take adequate notice of the ne-
gation that makes being there and makes us present to being. The for-itself
“knows being such as it is [tel qu’il est] when the ‘such as it is’ cannot be-
long to being.”95 This “such as it is” does not belong to being unless it is
in relationship with the for-itself, and so we are always implicitly aware
of what we bring to being—even if it is only negation. Realism cannot ac-
count for this. The realism thus rejected by Sartre is a crude kind of nat-
uralism in which the thing known has a causal influence on the knower,
in which known and knower belong to the same kind of being.96 Realism
may affirm being and even affirm the immediate presence of the for-itself
to being, but it cannot account for the negation of presence, the denial of
identity, which brings about an infinite distance between the for-itself and
being. “Knowing has for its ideal being-what-one-knows and for its orig-
inal structure not-being-what-is-known.”97 The world of experience, the
only world that we know, is human.
Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute, and there is a truth of knowl-
edge. But this truth, although releasing to us nothing more and nothing less
than the absolute, remains strictly human.98

In each of Sartre’s examples there has been an original synthesis that is

subsequently abstracted through reflection into two complementary parts.
Experience is the synthesis of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. Truth is
neither relative nor absolute, it is the relationship itself between the abso-
lute and human beings which makes up the world. Objectivity depends on
the subject. This will be a good place to turn to Aquinas. For him, we can
only know what we desire, yet neither the knowledge nor the desire de-
tract from the immediacy of our union with being—they are the condition
of that union.
93. BN 217; EN 254/269. 94. BN 217; EN 254/269.
95. BN 217; EN 254/270.
96. It would be quite possible, according to Herbert Spiegelberg, to consider Sartre’s phi-
losophy as “realist” in a wider sense, as committed to the independence of what is known from
the knower; see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 3rd ed. (The Hague,
The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 509.
97. BN 218; EN 254/270. 98. BN 218; EN 255/270.
 Chapter 4

T h e S u b j e c t i v e N at u r e of O b j e c t i v e
U n d e r s ta n d i n g i n A q u i n a s

Objectivity and the Human Subject

As creatures with intellect, human beings are open to the world
around them and transformed by what they understand. As
creatures with will, we desire what is good and seek our own
perfection. Within certain limits we can choose our goals and
in doing so choose who we will become. These are the conclu-
sions Aquinas led us to in chapter 2. It appears that human de-
sire must be based on a prior understanding of what is good.
Our decisions about ends and action, it seems, must have a ra-
tional foundation in the objective reality of the world as it is
understood by the intellect, and the detached and disinterested
work of the intellect must precede the more personal and pur-
poseful work of the will.
Aquinas’s thinking about the relationship between intellect
and will, however, is highly nuanced. He argues that the lov-
ing will and the knowing intellect always involve each other.
The true is something good and must be desired if it is to be
known. The good is something true and must be understood
if it is to be desired. At every level, intellect and will influence
each other. Nothing can be understood unless it is sought, and
nothing can be sought unless it is understood.
The technical Scholastic vocabulary can obscure the full
significance of what Aquinas is doing here philosophically.
He is exploring at different levels what we might today call the

117
118 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

question of objectivity; or, to see it from the other side, the question of the
subject. (A) At the level of epistemology he wants to affirm that our un-
derstanding is inescapably human. The desire of the will influences ev-
erything. Our purposes and preferences determine when we understand,
whether we understand, what we understand, and how we understand.
Understanding is thoroughly subjective—this is what makes it personal.
Yet at the same time we understand only what is there and nothing more.
It is the intellect that understands, not the will, and it is the nature of the
intellect to be formed by the being of whatever is understood. So under-
standing is thoroughly objective as well as subjective. The emergence of
objectivity in fact depends on subjectivity. (B) At the level of action theory
and ethics Aquinas wants to affirm that the goods we seek, which deter-
mine our actions, are freely chosen by the human subject. No good (apart
from the final end) is so good that it cannot be seen in a different perspec-
tive. We can choose which perspective to take on each good, so that the
subjective attractiveness of the good depends on our choice, and our ac-
tions follow from this choice. Yet at the same time we can only be attracted
to what is actually a good, since it is the intellect alone that understands
what is good in this personal perspective.
In both epistemology and action theory Aquinas thus proposes a kind
of subjective objectivity. Objective truth is unveiled through its encoun-
ter with a purposeful subject, and the subject only grasps this truth in the
terms of its own subjective preferences. It is still, nevertheless, completely
objective. The truth, as Sartre says, is strictly human.1
At this stage the notion of subjective objectivity may seem unconvinc-
ing. In this chapter we will revisit Aquinas’s descriptions of human intel-
lect and will. Each has its own clear function. The richness of his account
comes from the fact that there is a reflexive aspect to every human act, so
that human beings know their own knowing and their own willing, and
they will each act of knowing and each act of willing. In this context, ob-
jectivity takes on a different meaning. The search for foundations is still
possible, but much more nuanced. It will help to bear in mind that this
rather technical-sounding discussion about intellect and will concerns
these broad questions of objectivity, subjectivity, and the nature of human
experience.

1. BN 218; EN 255/270.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 119

I will not pay much attention in this chapter to the differences between
Aquinas’s earlier and later writings on intellect and will because I believe
that these differences are not of great significance. There is an ongoing de-
bate about the development of Aquinas’s thinking.2 Odon Lottin proposed
that Aquinas moved from a kind of intellectual determinism (in De veri-
tate) to a more voluntarist conception of human action that highlighted
the dynamic freedom of the will (in De malo 6).3 This fits with R. A. Gau-
thier’s contention that during his second regency in Paris Aquinas under-
went some kind of personal conversion that affected his writing and miti-
gated an excessive intellectualism displayed in earlier texts. This change in
outlook could have been due to the growing influence of Augustine or to
the theological/political situation in Paris in 1270 when there were suspi-
cions that the Thomistic intellectualist position led to a denial of the free-
dom of the will.4 But Kevin Flannery, as I have already noted in the his-
torical introduction, through a textual comparison of De malo 6 and De
veritate 24:1, judges that the article in De veritate is a rewrite of at least
parts of De malo 6.5 This would make De malo 6 quite an early work. My
only concern here is to show how difficult it is to draw conclusions about
the development of Aquinas’s thinking in this area. I accept Daniel West-
berg’s conclusion that the differences are in emphasis rather than in mat-
ters of substance: There is a consistent picture of the interdependence of
intellect and will, a picture in which every action takes place for the sake
of a good that is both understood and desired; and the earlier writings—if
they are indeed earlier—pay great attention to the place of the will in the
exercise of human freedom.6

2. See Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1: The Person and His Work (Wash-
ington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 244–46; and Daniel Westberg,
“Did Aquinas Change His Mind about the Will?” The Thomist 58 (1994): esp 41–60.
3. See Odon Lottin, “Libre arbitre et liberté depuis saint Anselme jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe
siècle,” in Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Gembloux: J. Duculot,
1957), 11–389. Note that there is still a dispute about the dating of De malo 6 itself; see the His-
torical Introduction above, in the section “Aquinas: Historical and Intellectual Background.”
4. See James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works (Wash-
ington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1983), 244–45; and Westberg, “Did
Aquinas Change His Mind about the Will?” 60.
5. Kevin L. Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2001), 247–49.
6. Westberg writes: “Free choice is a matter of choosing, on the part of both reason and
will, the bonum intellectum. This never changes in Thomas.” But in his later works “he came to
express more precisely that final causality had to do with the bonum aspect, and formal causal-
ity with intellectum”; see Westberg, “Did Aquinas Change His Mind about the Will?” 56.
120 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

It is worth making a final introductory note about the soul and its pow-
ers. Aquinas writes about the relationship that the human soul has with the
world. The soul (anima) in general, as we learned in chapter 2, is the pri-
mary principle of life for any living thing.7 A soul forms any living body.
It is the “shape” of each body insofar as it has this characteristic of being
alive about it.8 The human soul forms the human body. It is the “shape” of
the human body insofar as it is alive in a distinctively human way. So when
Aquinas writes that the soul relates or knows or wills we must not be mis-
led into thinking that some faculty is working of its own accord in isola-
tion from the life of the whole human being. Aquinas means that human
beings, insofar as they are acting in distinctively human ways, are doing
these things. It is not distinctively human to digest or snore or flee a pred-
ator—many other animals do these things. Yet it is distinctively human to
understand things and to act on the basis of this understanding.
In the same way, we must not treat intellect and will as if they were sep-
arately functioning substances or even biological individuals that assist the
soul in its thinking or acting, like talkative passengers in the backseat of
a car.9 Intellect and will are instead powers of the soul, which means that
they are the soul itself insofar as it is capable of acting in certain ways and
relating to certain objects.10 So to say that the intellect takes in or the will
goes out is simply to say that living human beings are doing these distinc-
tively human things. David Gallagher writes that “it is not the powers—
reason, will, appetite, etc.—which act, but the individual human person.”11
This is a holistic way of understanding the human being that still allows
one to analyze the distinct elements involved in human action.

7. ST I.75:1c.
8. ST I.75:5c.
9. Simon and Donagan warn against these dangers, without using this metaphor. See Yves
R. Simon, Freedom of Choice (New York: Fordham University Press, 1969), 97; and Alan Dona-
gan, “Thomas Aquinas on Human Action,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philos-
ophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1982), 654.
10. See ST I.77:1.
11. David M. Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” Archiv für
Geschichte der Philosophie 76 (1994): 276.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 121

The Interdependence of Intellect and Will

There are a number of places where Aquinas describes the intellect and the
will and their complementary functions. In an article about angels Aqui-
nas makes some distinctions that apply to human beings as well as to an-
gels.
[The will] cannot be the same thing as the intellect of angel or human being. Be-
cause knowledge comes about in so far as the object known is in the knower, so
that the intellect stretches out to what is outside it, inasmuch as what (in its es-
sence) is outside it is in some way suited to being within it [illud quod extra ip-
sum est per essentiam, natum est aliquo modo in eo esse]. On the other hand, the
will stretches out to what is outside it, inasmuch as by a certain inclination it
tends, in some way, to the external thing itself [quodammodo tendit in rem exte-
riorem]. Now it belongs to one faculty to have within itself something which is
outside it, and to another faculty to tend to a thing outside it. Consequently in-
tellect and will must necessarily be different powers in every creature.12

Human beings thus relate to the world in two distinctive and comple-
mentary ways. Through the intellect they take in what is outside them.
This “bringing inside” is actually a way of describing the intellect as it “ex-
tends itself to what is outside it”—so there is no danger of forgetting that
knowledge is a relationship we have with things and not just an internal
possession of thoughts about things. Through the will human beings go
out in rem exteriorem, “toward the external thing.” Willing is a movement
that brings about a change in our active relationship with the world and
not just in our understanding. We involve ourselves, as Aquinas writes in
De veritate, with “the being that the thing has in itself ” and not just with its
being as it is understood.13
Human beings take things in through the intellect and go out to them
through the will; they think and they act; they understand the world and
they try to achieve things in this world. There seems to be a natural pro-
gression from understanding to willing, and in a number of places Aqui-
nas writes in a straightforward way about the dependence of the will on
the intellect. We touched on this topic in chapter 2. We share with all ani-
mals an ability to be moved by what we apprehend in our environment.

12. ST I.59:2c. 13. DV 22:11c.

122 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

“An animal is able to desire what it apprehends, and not only that to which
it is inclined by its natural form.”14 The will depends, moreover, on reason
to supply its object.15 Three passages illustrate this point.
The will does not do the ordering, but tends to something as it is ordered by
reason. Consequently this word “intention” indicates an act of the will, presup-
posing the ordering of the reason as it orders something to the end.16

The goodness of the will depends properly on the object. Now the will’s object is
proposed to it by reason. Because the good as it is understood [bonum intellec-
tum] is the object of the will proportioned to it.17

If then we consider the movement of the powers of the soul on the part of the
object specifying the act, the first principle of motion is from the intellect, for in
this way the good as it is understood [bonum intellectum] moves even the will
itself.18

In this scheme it is the intellect that first understands what is good and
the will that consequently seeks it. There are so many fitting examples one
could imagine: A woman sees that a job advertised in the newspaper has
a high salary, so she puts in an application for the post. A man catches
sight of a particularly striking painting in a gallery, so he sits down to con-
template it. A child is learning to read, so her parents help her with her
homework. There are objective goods here—money, beauty, literacy—and
they have to be understood by the intellect before they can be sought by
the will. While there is certainly much more to acting than simply under-
standing, nevertheless we cannot desire or act unless we already have an
objective understanding of the goods before us:
The object of the intellect is more simple and more absolute than the object of
the will, since the object of the intellect is the very meaning of desirable good
[ipsa ratio boni appetibilis]; and the desirable good, whose meaning is grasped
by the intellect [cuius ratio est in intellectu], is the object of the will.19

14. ST I.80:1c.
15. Reason (ratio) and intellect are the same power in human beings, though they work in
different ways. Through intellect we apprehend intelligible truth; through reason we build on
this truth and connect it with other truths and so arrive at a deeper intelligible truth. See ST
I.79:8.
16. ST I-II.12:1ad3. 17. ST I-II.19:3c.
18. DM 6c [339–43]. 19. ST I.82:3c.
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It is difficult to translate this passage fairly, yet the main idea is clear. In
order for the will to be attracted to a good, the intellect must first take in
the fact that something is good and desirable [ipsa ratio boni appetibilis], it
must comprehend its ratio, its meaning.
The will, therefore, depends on the intellect. The intellect takes priority.
In ST I.82:4, however, Aquinas tries to look at the question in another way.
In the first articles of question I.82 Aquinas accepts that the will moves hu-
man beings toward their beatitudo (happiness), toward their perfect good
(art. 1), by seeking certain particular goods (art. 2), in response to the un-
derstanding that the intellect has of what is good (art. 3). Bonum enim intel-
lectum movet voluntatem, “the good which is understood moves the will.”20
Then, in article 4, Aquinas shifts to another level and asks whether the will
moves the intellect. At first sight this is a surprising and perhaps unnec-
essary question. One might think that Aquinas has already resolved the
question of the order of intellect and will. The will, he has already shown,
is the movement of human beings toward the good as it is presented by
the intellect. Now, strangely, Aquinas asks whether this process of under-
standing is itself something that we have to want. This is a reflexive ques-
tion about whether the act of the intellect, which furnishes the will with its
object, is itself something that we desire, something that we actively seek,
something for which we are responsible.
Reflexivity is a hugely significant issue, and it will allow us to return
to the subject of self-consciousness that we touched on in part one. It is
worth looking at ST I.82:4 in depth, together with the related articles DV
22:12 (“Does the will move the intellect and the other powers of the soul?”),
ST I-II.9:1 (“Whether the will is moved by the intellect?”), and certain pas-
sages in DM 6. The insights it provides might help us to answer some of
the questions that were left hanging at the end of part one: How are we
conscious of our consciousness of things? How are we present to our pres-
ence to things? How can we at one and the same time affirm and question
our identity and our understanding of the world?
The objections to the reflexive thesis of ST I.82:4 all revolve around the
problem of priority. I will paraphrase the three short arguments. Objection
1: It has already been established (in art. 3) that the intellect precedes and

20. ST I.82:3ad2.
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moves the will by its understanding of the good. (In DV 22:12obj1 Aquinas
cites Augustine: “For nothing is loved or desired unless it is known.”)21 Ob-
jection 2: It is the nature of the will to move (the human being) after it has
been moved (by the good that is understood), and it is the nature of the in-
tellect to move the will (by understanding the good) on the basis of some-
thing that does not move (the apprehended good). In other words, there is
a nonmoving foundation to movement, a source of movement, which in
this case is the goodness of the object understood. In other words, the re-
ality of the world is what founds our understanding and therefore our de-
sires. Objection 3: Aquinas will not allow any room for some kind of un-
motivated, purposeless, irrational willing. The will is precisely the rational
appetite, and “we can will nothing but what we understand.”22 So if the will
does move us to understand, it must have a reason to do this, and so we
must already think that it is good to understand at this moment. This will-
ing (of the process of understanding) must be on the basis of some prior
understanding, by the intellect, of the goodness of this act of understand-
ing. This prior understanding would itself have needed willing, “and so on
indefinitely, which is impossible.”23 In other words, if willing is to be ratio-
nal, there must be at least some foundation in the intellect for the initial
act of willing.
All three objections argue that the priority of the intellect is essential
to the whole structure that Aquinas has been working to build. Without
this priority: (obj1) our understanding has no objective foundation in the
world, (obj2) our willing has no objective foundation in what is under-
stood, and (obj3) a vicious circle of understanding and willing is created
in which there is no beginning and no possibility of justifying any thought
or action.

Exercise and Specification

In the body of ST I.82:4 Aquinas makes some distinctions and begins to
explore the reflexive nature of the soul. We can relate his answers here to
those he gives in the related articles DV 22:12, ST I-II.9:1, and DM 6. There
are two ways in which one thing can move another thing.

21. DV 22:12obj1. 22. ST I.82:4obj3.

23. ST I.82:4obj3.
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First, as an end; for instance, when we say that the end moves the agent. In this
way the intellect moves the will because the good understood is the object of
the will, and moves it as an end.24

Aquinas never renounces this principle that the will can only ever seek
what the intellect presents to it as good. The “end that moves” gives shape
and direction to the movement. In DV 22:12 Aquinas characterizes this end
as the ratio agendi, the ratio movendi: it is the reason for acting, the pattern
or meaning or sense of this particular movement. He clarifies this issue by
saying that the ratio agendi is “the form of the agent by which it acts.” This
form “is in the agent by way of intention,” through its reception by the in-
tellect, and “not according to the existence it has of its nature [non secun-
dum esse naturae].”25 The intellect, therefore, grasps the goal to be achieved
and presents it to the will, it praeconcipit (“conceives beforehand”) the ra-
tio of the end.
The second way in which one thing is said to move another thing is
this:
A thing is said to move as an agent, in the way that what causes an alteration
moves the thing it alters, and what pushes moves what is pushed [sicut alterans
movet alteratum, et impellens movet impulsum]. In this way the will moves the
intellect and all the powers of the soul.26

Alterare has the general sense of altering, changing, or making different;

impellere has a slightly more specific sense of instigating, inciting, or ini-
tiating the process of change. DV 22:12 gives a simple explanation of this.
Action and movement concern things as they are in themselves, in the
world, and not as they are spiritually in the soul by way of intention. It is
the will that relates to things in this way, which inclines human beings to
real things in the world and not just to intentions in their minds. We could
paraphrase this by saying that no amount of theorizing will actually make
anything happen. Aquinas offers a terse example: The idea of heat never
kept anyone warm (“it is not heat in the soul which heats, but that which
is in fire”).27
In ST I-II.9:1 (and in DM 6) Aquinas identifies these two types of move-
ment by distinguishing between the exercise or use (exercitium vel usus) of
24. ST I.82:4c. 25. DV 22:12c.
26. ST I.82:4c. 27. DV 22:12c.
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an act and its determination (determinatio) or specification (specificatio).28

He uses the analogy of sight. To see anything at all we have to exercise our
sight, we actually have to be seeing. If we are then exercising our sight,
what we actually see (the objects, the colors, the distances) is determined
by the world we are looking at and not by ourselves. “The first of these is
on the part of the subject, which is sometimes acting, sometimes not act-
ing, while the other is on the part of the object, by reason of which the
act is specified.”29 Aquinas recalls the language of “form” from DV 22:12
and writes that the determination specified by the object is a type of for-
mal principle, and “the first formal principle is universal ‘being’ and ‘truth,’
which is the object of the intellect.”30
So there are two types of movement: exercise, which gets the whole
process going; and specification, which determines how the process will
develop. The intellect, like other powers of the soul, has its own proper ob-
ject, its own good, which is the truth of things. Once it is acting, the activ-
ity of the intellect is governed by its proper object, but this intellectual ac-
tivity itself needs activating—it does not just happen. Intellectual activity
is not an independent, uncontrollable vegetative function (like sweating)
since we can choose not to understand something. Nor is it an essential as-
pect of being human that occurs simply by virtue of our being human (like
being alive), since we are still human even if we are not understanding.31
Intellectual activity, with its particular ends, needs activating by the will,
which seeks the more universal human good (which is happiness).
Aquinas continues in the body of ST I.82:4:
Now the object of the will is good and the end in general, and each power is di-
rected to some suitable good proper to it, as sight is directed to the perception
of colour, and the intellect to the knowledge of truth. Therefore the will as agent
moves all the powers of the soul to their respective acts, except the natural pow-
ers of the vegetative part, which are not subject to our decision.32

28. In ST I-II.9:1 and DM 6c “determination” and “specification” are synonymous and used
interchangeably. In ST I-II.10:2 Aquinas writes only of “specification.”
29. ST I-II.9:1c.
30. ST I-II.9:1c.
31. This is why Aquinas writes that the intellect is a power of the soul (which can be acting
or not acting) and is not to be identified with the essence of the soul (which simply is as long as
the human being is alive). See ST I.77:1.
32. ST I.82:4c.
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There are a number of points to note here. The will activates an act of
understanding but does not specify the content of the understanding. This
activation is for the sake of an end, which is the universal good that the
human being seeks, and so the activation is itself based on a prior under-
standing of the universal good. Yet there is not a vicious circle, since the
prior understanding of happiness that motivates the will is not the same as
the particular understanding which the intellect achieves now in this par-
ticular act of understanding.
A similar argument is put forward in DM 6:
But if we consider the movement of the powers of the soul on the part of the
exercise of the act, in this way the principle of motion is from the will. For the
power to which the principle end pertains always moves to act the power to
which pertains that which is for the end, for example the military art moves the
bridle-maker to operate. And in this way the will moves both itself and all the
other powers: for I understand because I will to, and likewise I use all the other
powers and habits because I will to do so.33

The implications of this are profound. All human understanding is for

the sake of something larger, which is our ultimate goal in life—whatever
that may be.34 We are not trapped in the immediacy of our present experi-
ence. We do not just automatically understand the world and automatically
seek what we understand. We also decide whether we want to understand
or not, we determine when we shall understand, on the basis of a larger
understanding and an already established commitment to a larger goal. In
other words, we have a reflective distance from those acts that seem to be
a constitutive part of our experience. On the one hand, we understand and
evaluate the world to which we are present; there is an immediacy and
transparency that creates a kind of identification between self and world
and values and actions. On the other hand, we are also understanding and
evaluating this very process of understanding and evaluating the world, in
the light of a deeper understanding of who we are and what we seek.
Before analyzing the responses Aquinas gives to the objections to ST
I.82:4, it is worth pausing to remind ourselves that intellect and will are
powers of the soul, and that it is the integrated human being who acts.
33. DM 6c [343–52].
34. We will look at the question of how this ultimate goal is determined by each human
being in chapter 6.
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The faculties are not separate agents. Although we can identify the distinct
stages involved in this mutual determination of intellect and will, there is a
unified process taking place. David Gallagher explains it this way:
When we say, in a kind of shorthand, that the will moves the intellect or the in-
tellect moves the will, we always mean that the person voluntarily exercises his
capacity to know or that the person, through an act of knowing, determines
himself to choose one act or another.35

The exercise of the intellect’s act and the specification of the will’s act occur
together, as part of a single process with distinct aspects.

Reflexivity of Intellect and Will

The reply to the first objection of ST I.82:4 is a substantial reflection on the
interrelation of intellect and will and is like a continuation of the body of
the article. Aquinas's key insight is that there are two ways of considering
intellect and will. First, one can consider these powers in terms of their
general object, “as apprehensive of universal being and truth,” as “appeti-
tive of universal good.”36 Second, one can consider the intellect or the will
secundum quod est quaedam res, et particularis potentia habens determina-
tum actum, “as a thing of a certain sort and a particular power having a de-
terminate act.” We can, as it were, stand within the functioning of intellect
or of will, looking out at their objects, or we can stand outside these pro-
cesses and see them as objects of investigation or of desire in themselves,
as observable things, powers, and acts. Human beings are not only within
their experience of understanding and wanting, looking out to the world,
transparently concerned with the true and the good. We are not just com-
pletely caught up in our own activity, unaware of ourselves. We are also
aware of our own understanding and wanting, because these are acts that
we can view taking place within our “world” as well as vantage points on
that world. We are conscious of the act of our own consciousness of the
world, and thus we are implicitly conscious of and present to ourselves.
The soul, of which intellect and will are powers, is not just formed by the
world and attracted to what it finds, it is also formed by its own under-
standing of itself-being-formed and attracted by its understanding of itself-

35. Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” 276.
36. ST I.82:4ad1.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 129

being-attracted. It may seem tendentious to draw so much meaning out of

a straightforward distinction, but the reflexive nature of intellect and will
is brought out with great clarity in the second half of this first reply:
If, however, we take the intellect as regards the common nature of its object
and the will as a determinate power, then again the intellect is higher than and
prior to the will, because under the notion of being and truth [sub ratione entis
et veri] (which the intellect apprehends) is contained both the will itself, and its
act, and its object. Wherefore the intellect understands the will, and its act, and
its object, just as it understands other species of things, as stone or wood, which
are contained in the common notion of being and truth. But if we consider the
will as regards the common nature of its object, which is good, and the intel-
lect as a certain thing and a particular power, then the intellect itself, and its act
of understanding, and its object, which is truth, each of which is some species
of good, is contained under the common notion of good, as one particular in-
stance of it [sub communi ratione boni continetur, velut quoddam speciale]. And
in this way the will is higher than the intellect, and can move it.37

So, in some respects, the will is an object for the intellect, and in other re-
spects, the intellect for the will. There is no suggestion, however, that one
consideration excludes the other. The simultaneous reflexivity of intellect
and will is a perpetual possibility, as Aquinas implies in the conclusion to
this reply, which repeats a thought from ST I.16:4ad1.
From this we can understand why these powers encompass each other in their
acts [hae potentiae suis actibus invicem se includunt], because the intellect un-
derstands the will to will, and the will wills the intellect to understand [quia in-
tellectus intelligit voluntatem velle, et voluntas vult intellectum intellegere]. In the
same way good is contained under truth, inasmuch as it is an understood truth,
and truth is contained under good, inasmuch as it is a desired good.38

When this same argument about the mutual influence of acts of intellect
and will on each other is referred to in ST I-II.17:1 Aquinas adds the fol-
lowing seemingly paradoxical conclusion: “The result is that an act of rea-
son precedes an act of will, and conversely [actum voluntatis praeveniri ab
actu rationis, et e converso].”39

37. ST I.82:4ad1. 38. ST I.82:4ad1.

39. ST I-II.17:1c.
130 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

At this point it could be objected that none of this is properly reflexive,

since the intellect can be an object for the will, and the will an object for the
intellect, but it has not been established that each can be an object for itself.
A preliminary answer, staying within the bounds of ST I.82:4, could rightly
refer to the unity of the soul. It is the soul that reflects on itself, through
the operation of these two powers. There is only one soul, which wills its
understanding and understands its willing. This idea alone would provide
a remarkable foundation for an understanding of self-consciousness, self-
possession, and freedom. DV 22:12, however, goes further and provides a
much more explicit statement of the capacity of each power to reflect on
itself as well as on the other powers. Aquinas cites the immateriality of the
soul as a reason for this.
The higher powers of the soul, because immaterial, are capable of reflecting
upon themselves. Both the will and the intellect, therefore, reflect upon them-
selves, and upon each other, and upon the essence of the soul, and upon all its
powers [reflectuntur super se, et unum super alterum, et super essentiam animae,
et super omnes eius vires]. The intellect understands itself and the will and the
essence of the soul and all the soul’s powers. Similarly the will wills itself to will,
and the intellect to understand, and wills the essence of the soul, and similarly
the other powers [Intellectus enim intelligit se, et voluntatem, et essentiam ani-
mae, et omnes animae vires; et similiter voluntas vult se velle, et intellectum intel-
ligere, et vult essentiam animae, et sic de aliis].40

These statements about reflexivity could not be clearer, but they raise the
question of what it means for something to act on itself. In ST I-II.9:3 Aqui-
nas addresses this question by asking how the will can move itself. He con-
cludes that in willing an end it can will the means to this end, although in
this case something that is actual (the will already willing the end) brings
about a new willing (the will willing the means) that was only potential,
and so the will does not move itself to move “in respect of the same” (se-
cundum idem).41 This clarification of a necessary order within the reflexive
activity of each power is what stops Aquinas’s claims descending into ab-
surdity; in chapter 6 we will look at the hierarchy of goods and truths that
stabilizes human action. Yet we should not shy away from that element of

40. DV 22:12c.
41. ST I-II.9:3ad1.
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circularity that haunts these discussions about reflexivity and which Aqui-
nas readily acknowledged:
Since there is in reflection a certain similarity to circular motion, in which what
is last in the movement is what was originally the beginning [Cum in reflexione
sit quaedam similitudo motus circularis in quo est ultimum motus quod primo
erat principium], we must so express ourselves in regard to reflection that what
was originally prior then becomes posterior.42

A final citation on this subject leaves no doubt about the reflexive pro-
cesses involved in something like choice:
Choice precedes use, if they be referred to the same object. But nothing hin-
ders the use of one thing preceding the choice of another. And since the acts
of the will react on one another, in each act of the will we can find both con-
sent and choice and use; so that we may say that the will consents to choosing,
and consents to consenting, and uses itself in consenting and choosing [volun-
tas consentit se eligere, et consentit se consentire, et utitur se ad consentiendum et
eligendum].43

These are huge claims, as radical as anything in Sartre, about the capac-
ity we have to take a view on ourselves and on our involvement with the
world. Aquinas seems to go even further than Sartre by stating that the in-
tellect can even reflect upon the essence of the soul (see above, DV 22:12c).
He proposes all this without any danger of dualism, without any sugges-
tion of a separate self.
What is the point of introducing this reflexive second level to the func-
tioning of the soul? Is it not enough for human beings to relate to the world
without relating to their own powers? What is the difference, for example,
between willing and willing to will, between knowing and knowing that one
knows? Why the duplication? The answer is that it will allow Aquinas to ex-
plain how human beings are free. If we apprehend our own involvement
with the world we can assess what we are doing and why we are doing it, we
can judge what we wish to understand and whether we want to act. Aquinas
believes that we have a presence-to-self through this presence to our acts of
intellect and will. Without this we cannot be free. His central contention,

42. DV 22:12ad1.
43. ST I-II.16:4ad3.
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repeated time and again, is that human beings do not just take in the world
through knowledge and reach out to it through desire, we also know our
own knowing and desiring, and desire our own knowing and desiring.
Understanding, therefore, is an act of the intellect that only takes place
when it is wanted by the will. There are different levels to this. To under-
stand anything at all, to understand in general, we have to want to under-
stand in general, we have to want the intellect to function. To understand
this object, we have to want to understand this object. To understand this
aspect of this object, we have to want to understand this aspect of this ob-
ject. This never means that the will is determining the nature of what is
understood, since this formal determination is specified solely by the ob-
ject and apprehended by the intellect. Yet it means that whenever we un-
derstand anything we have to think that it is good to understand, and good
to understand this object, and good to understand this object in this way.
Each level of understanding is an act that needs willing, although the dif-
ferent acts may be implicitly willed in a single act.
There are many unresolved issues here, and I will leave most of them
hanging. I will return to the problems of circularity, priority, and the foun-
dation of our ultimate goals in chapter 6 on freedom. But one note needs
to be made at this stage about ST I.82:4ad3, which seems to undermine the
thesis I am presenting here, and indeed the arguments Aquinas has put
forward in the rest of the article. The third objection was concerned with
the infinite regress that seems to be established if the will moves the in-
tellect to understand, and if that very willing requires some prior under-
standing, and so on. Aquinas replies:
There is no need to go on indefinitely, but we must stop at the intellect as hav-
ing priority [sed statur in intellectu sicut in primo]. For some apprehension must
precede every movement of the will, whereas not every apprehension is pre-
ceded by a movement of the will [Omnem enim voluntatis motum necesse est
quod praecedat apprehensio, sed non omnem apprehensionem praecedit motus
voluntatis]. But the principle of counselling and understanding is an intellectual
principle higher than our intellect, and this is God [Sed principium consiliandi
et intelligendi est aliquod intellectivum principium altius intellectu nostro, quod
est Deus]—as Aristotle says in the Eudemian Ethics. And in this way he shows
that there is no need to proceed indefinitely.44

44. ST I.82:4ad3; referring to Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics 7:14, 1248a18ff.

 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 133

Taken out of context, the central phrase seems to deny the interdepen-
dence of intellect and will: “..... not every apprehension is preceded by a
movement of the will.”45 It appears to contradict Aquinas’s argument ear-
lier in the same article that, as far as the activation of the intellect is con-
cerned (per modum agentis), “the will moves the intellect and all the other
powers of the soul”; and that, as far as the powers include each other in
their acts, “the intellect understands that the will wills, and the will wills
the intellect to understand.”46 But the reply needs to be read carefully. It is
not at all clear in what respect the intellect has priority, or what kind of ap-
prehension is at issue here. Does Aquinas mean that sometimes the intel-
lect functions in isolation from the will, as if we have two distinct modes of
knowing (one willed, the other not); or two distinct objects of knowledge
(one kind willed, and the other not)? Such an interpretation would seem to
run counter to the body of the article and to the response to the first objec-
tion, and it would leave us with acts (of knowing) that were not truly hu-
man acts, in the terms set by Aquinas, since they would not include the ac-
tive involvement of the human person which is signified by the will.
Or perhaps there is some initial apprehension at the beginning of any
process of deliberation when a possible goal “comes to mind,” not because
we have decided to investigate it, but because of external circumstances or
because of the “internal” workings of our memory or imagination or sub-
conscious. Sometimes things just happen, sometimes thoughts just “hap-
pen,” and we have to determine whether to focus our attention on them
and pursue them, or whether to let them fall away. Eleonore Stump, in con-
sidering this third reply, gives the example of hearing the telephone ring
when one is immersed in another activity.47 We hear the telephone; we re-
flect on whether to answer it or not; and then we stop what we are doing
and go to answer it. There is no question of an infinite regress here, since
this particular process of decision making began with an unexpected event

45. It is striking how often this phrase is quoted in isolation as a kind of proof-text. See,
e.g., P. S. Eardley, “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will,” Review of Metaphysics 56
(2003): 845–46; and T. H. Irwin, “The Scope of Deliberation: A Conflict in Aquinas,” Review of
Metaphysics 44 (1990): 23–24, where Irwin refers to the passage, and concludes that “intellect is
prior to will and independent of it” (23), and that “the intellect operates independently of the
will and initiates the motions of the will” (24)—which seems to be drawing far too much from
Aquinas’s few words.
46. ST I.82:4c and ST I.82:4ad1.
47. Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2003), 282.
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and an uninvited apprehension of that event. This is uncontroversial, and

says nothing more than the fact that knowledge is rooted in experience.
But notice that the initial apprehension is not a knowledge that determines
which choice we shall actually make—it is the very thing that causes there
to be a choice in the first place. We have to attend to that apprehension (or
not), weigh up the different possible responses (or not), make a choice (or
not), and do what we have chosen to do (or not). All of this involves both
the will and the intellect; and none of it is determined by the initial appre-
hension. From the very moment when we first take notice of the initial
apprehension, intellect and will are involved inextricably in that reflexive
process described so fully in the rest of the article. So on this reading, in a
restricted sense, some kinds of knowledge do arise without any movement
of the will, and provide a foundation for the whole willed process that en-
sues. But this does not mean that for Aquinas every movement of the will
is directed with any necessity by a prior determination of reason.
On another reading, we should note that Aquinas relates whatever this
“unwilled” apprehension is to the principium consiliandi et intelligendi, to
the principle or source or foundation of our deliberating and understanding;
and this he identifies with an intellectual principle higher than our intellect,
namely, God. Notice that he does not say that the principium consiliandi et
intelligendi is caused by God, or has its foundation in God; he says that it is
God—which suggests that the principium is not so much a first principle
that we use within our deliberating and understanding, but is rather a tran-
scendent foundation of our deliberating and understanding. Aquinas thus
shifts the focus of his response away from the question of whether, within
our rational activity, the intellect or will has priority (he has dealt with this
in the response to the first objection), and he turns it toward the larger ques-
tion of whether our whole rational activity has some foundation in intellect.
And he answers, Yes—but it is God’s intellect not ours. This is what saves the
whole intellectual-volitional structure from an infinite regress.
So perhaps the unwilled apprehension referred to is not so much a par-
ticular unsought item of knowledge (which then founds a particular act of
the will), but is instead the more fundamental orientation of the intellect
to the truth, which must have its external foundation in God.48 The men-

48. This interpretation would create a parallel with DM 6c (390–91), which tackles the ap-
parent circularity of willing and taking counsel, and concludes that the will must be moved “by
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 135

tion of the Eudemian Ethics makes this interpretation plausible, since in

other places where Aquinas refers to the same text it is because he is con-
cerned with God as an exterior, foundational principle for our knowing
and willing, and not as a source of particular interior acts of supposedly
(unwilled) knowing or (unknown) willing. In ST I-II.9:4c, for example, he
refers to the Eudemian Ethics, and concludes that “the will advanced to its
first movement in virtue of the instigation of some exterior mover.”
In conclusion, it is not clear exactly what Aquinas is saying in this dif-
ficult response to the third objection of ST I.82:4. If only he had given
some examples of the unwilled apprehensions he is describing. Perhaps he
has in mind some very specific convictions or principles of reason that are
planted in us by nature (and ultimately by God); perhaps he is pointing to
the initial apprehensions that catch our mind unexpectedly when we are
focused on other things; perhaps he is referring, as he does in the response
to the first objection and in the previous article, to the different ways in
which the intellect can be considered higher than and prior to the will—
knowing that the will, in other ways, must also be considered higher than
and prior to the intellect; perhaps he is arguing that the whole work of de-
liberating and understanding relies on a transcendent foundation that is
itself intellectual; perhaps there are other issues here. The one thing that
is clear from this statement about the priority of the intellect is that Aqui-
nas is not undermining the carefully constructed arguments made in the
rest of the article about the interdependence and reflexivity of intellect and
will.

The Will Activating the Intellect

The main concern of this present chapter is to notice the implications for
Aquinas’s concept of objectivity. We have learnt that through the intellect
human beings are open to the world. We are present to the objective real-
ity of things and transformed by them. But now the functioning of this in-
tellect seems to depend on the human will. Despite Aquinas’s reassurances
that the understanding of the intellect is formed solely by its object, we are
left with the suspicion that our own desires determine our understanding.
If this is true, it is a strange and very human notion of objectivity. I will

something external, by the impulse of which the will begins to will [ab aliquo exteriori, cuius
instinctu voluntas velle incipiat]”—namely, God.
136 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

sketch some ways in which Aquinas’s idea of objectivity is indeed thor-

oughly human, and make some links with the views of Sartre outlined in
the previous chapter.
Aquinas has likened understanding to sight.49 We have to open our
eyes “before” we can see anything; we have to “exercise” our sight, to get
it working, “before” this sight can be specified by the objects we see. This
is true even though the exercise and specification are simultaneous—the
opening of the eyes coincides with the beginning of seeing. So we can’t be-
gin to see in general without actually seeing anything in particular, but we
must want to see in general in order to see anything in particular. In the
same way the intellect, “before” it can be specified by its objects, needs to
be exercised. In terms of this exercising, “no object moves the will nec-
essarily, for no matter what the object be, it is in our power not to think
of it, and consequently not to will it actually.”50 If we stop thinking about
something, then we will stop desiring it, so if we want to desire anything in
particular we have to have the more general desire to think at all. Human
beings can’t understand anything unless they have an interest in under-
standing. The functioning of the intellect is an act that must be willed. This
may seem a trivial point. We need to have a brief digression on the subject
of the human end in order to appreciate its significance—even though the
subject will be dealt with more fully in chapter 6.
In the first question of Part I-II of the Summa Aquinas discusses the
nature of our final end. It will help to summarize the relevant conclusions:
(ST I-II.1:1) Human actions are those in our control that proceed from a
deliberate will. The will seeks an end, a good, and so human actions are
those done for an end. (1:3) Actions are specified by this end, which pre-
exists in one’s intention. (1:4) There must be a final end, a first thing that
attracts us in the order of intention, for the sake of which an action takes
place, otherwise no good would actually move our appetite. (1:5) Each in-
dividual can have only one final end at any moment. We cannot direct our
will to various final ends at the same time since we are integrated beings
who seek a single fulfillment in our perfect good—whatever that may be.
(1:6) Whatever we desire, it must be desired for the sake of our last end, be-
cause we wish all goods to contribute somehow to our perfect good, and

49. See the comments on ST I-II.9:1, above.

50. ST I-II.10:2c.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 137

our will could not be attracted to a particular good unless we were seeking
our greatest good through it. (1:7) All human beings share in this desire for
their own fulfillment, but they do not all agree about which good will sat-
isfy this ultimate longing. Some desire riches, some pleasure, others some-
thing else.
So all human actions take place for the sake of the ultimate good of the
one who acts. We can now combine this conclusion with the earlier con-
clusion that the functioning of the intellect is an act that must be willed.
This means that all our understanding has to occur within the framework
of our goals and desires. No understanding is neutral or passive, it never
just comes to us, even though the content of understanding comes from
the object. There is therefore always a personal stake in human under-
standing, it depends on a commitment to our final goal, and it only takes
place if we judge that understanding is a good that helps us achieve our fi-
nal goal. This has nothing to do with the distinction between the specu-
lative and the practical intellects.51 All acts of the intellect, speculative as
much as practical, are acts that have to be wanted and willed because they
are good and because they help us to achieve our final goal. Acts both of
the speculative and the practical intellect have to be judged (by the practi-
cal intellect) to be worthwhile.
Objective knowledge therefore requires the personal commitment of
the subject, and each single act of understanding has to be wanted as a
means to our happiness. In this sense our objective understanding of the
world reflects our subjective attitude to the world. Understanding is still
not in any way specified by the desires of the subject, but the fact that there
is any understanding at any moment is completely dependent on our deep-
est personal desire. Our desire to understand (or not) influences the way
the world is revealed to us, and different human worlds emerge, depend-
ing on the interest of the subject. This is true even before we take into ac-
count what our specific interests are. The measure of our interest as such
affects the world we allow ourselves to encounter. We can take an example.
Some tourists visit London together. One doesn’t want to learn anything
because he is tired from the journey; one hates learning because she as-
sociates it with dull school lessons; one is hungry for knowledge so he can

51. See ST I.79:11, where Aquinas explains that they are the same power directed either to
consideration of the truth or to operation.
138 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

use it to impress people at home; another wants to understand all she sees
in order to please the tour guide. They have different reasons for under-
standing or not understanding the world they are in, for exercising their
intellect. Their desire will determine whether they take in this world or
not, yet the world they take in will not depend on them at all. In this sense
the world that each of them discovers is a human world and depends com-
pletely on the ultimate goal that motivates them. David Burrell writes of
Aquinas’s view:
Knowledge or information can be assimilated only in the measure we have
sought it. This is not to say, of course, that we find only what we’re looking for!
We may well be surprised. But at least we have to be probing in the area which
yields the unexpected knowledge.52

If understanding in general needs exercising, it is also the case that each

particular act of understanding needs exercising. We cannot see unless we
are willing to open our eyes and to pay attention to the particular object
within our sight. The willing of the general exercise is included in the par-
ticular exercise, but it is nevertheless distinct. This is apparent when we
have a desire to see a particular object which is frustrated by an unwilling-
ness to see in general (e.g., we want to watch the film but we are too tired
to keep our eyes open), and when we have a desire to see in general which
is frustrated by a failure to see anything in particular (e.g., we want to see
but there is a power outage and it is pitch black). We can recall the follow-
ing passage already cited:
But if we consider the will as regards the common nature of its object, which
is good, and the intellect as a certain thing and a particular power, then the in-
tellect itself, and its act of understanding, and its object, which is truth, each
of which is some species of good, are contained under the common notion of
good, as particular things. And in this way the will is higher than the intel-
lect.53

So the will has to want each particular act of understanding. Put another
way, we can only understand something if we think it is good to under-
stand. It is vital to remember that it is the goodness of the act of under-

52. David B. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1979), 121.
53. ST I.82:4ad1.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 139

standing that is in question at this reflexive level, and not the goodness of
the object of understanding, which is determined by the being of the ob-
ject itself. The intellect alone discerns the goodness of a thing.54

The Possibility of Different Points of View

If the exercise of the intellect by the will influences our understanding of
the world, it is also true that the manner in which the intellect is exercised
influences our understanding as well. The intellect approaches its object
in different ways, from different perspectives. It does not just take a cold,
neutral view of the world. The particular view it takes colors the nature of
the good that it discovers, so that the personal approach adopted by the in-
tellect, as much as the character of the object itself, determines which good
the will is attracted to. This may seem to undermine Aquinas’s contention
that the good is specified solely by the object, and that the will is necessar-
ily attracted to a good object. There are two articles in Part I-II that will
help us clarify these questions.
In ST I-II.10:2 Aquinas asks whether the will is moved by its object
of necessity. First, as we have already seen, Aquinas writes that no object
moves the will to the exercise of its act necessarily, since it is in our power
not to think of it and so not to be actually attracted to it. We would then
expect Aquinas to say that at the level of specification, when the will is
confronted with a particular object, the movement will be necessitated by
the object. The will should either be attracted to the object or not, depend-
ing on the nature of the object. We have learnt that the goodness of a thing,
its attractiveness, depends on its being, which is apprehended by the intel-
lect. So there should be a necessity about the will’s movement (or lack of
movement) toward an object. Yet Aquinas doesn’t quite say this. He does
confirm our expectations by insisting that “if the will be offered an object
which is good universally and from every point of view [universaliter bo-
num et secundum omnem considerationem], the will tends to it of necessity,
if it wills anything at all; since it cannot will the opposite.”55 How could we
not want the perfect good? But then he introduces a fascinating analogy
with sight and says that we can decide whether we are moved by some-

54. We shall see in chapter 6 why a good object does not necessarily move the will even
when it is understood by the intellect.
55. ST I-II.10:2c.
140 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

thing by deciding in what way we attend to it. As Sartre says, it is we who

determine in what perspective the world is seen, and this perspective has a
great significance.
Aquinas develops the analogy in this way: Sight is concerned with what
is visible. It is “illuminated color” (obiectum coloratum in actu) that moves
the sight.56 If we are actually looking at something which is illuminated, if
our sight is being exercised and we do not turn our eyes away, we cannot
fail to see it.
But if sight were confronted with something only partially illuminated [quod
non omnibus modis esset color in actu], and with one part lit up, one part in
darkness [sed secundum aliquid esset tale, secundum autem aliquid non tale],
then sight would not necessarily see such an object, for it might direct its atten-
tion to that part of the object in darkness [qua non est coloratum in actu], and
thus it would not see it.57

Aquinas imagines that part of an object is hidden in shadow. Let’s say that
a bright scarf is carelessly placed in an open drawer, with one end dangling
out over the front. When we look at the end hanging in the light of the
room, we see it quite clearly. But if we peer into the back of the drawer we
can hardly see the scarf—its color and even its outline are indistinct in the
darkness and we cannot distinguish it from the gloves and T-shirts. Aqui-
nas wants to make a subtle distinction on which his whole philosophy of
freedom depends. There is a difference, he believes, between (A) not look-
ing at something and (B) looking at something without seeing it—even
though in both cases we fail to see the thing. In the first case, we turn our
gaze away from something. In the second case, we turn our gaze to a dif-
ferent part of the same thing, and this shift of attention means we are un-
able to see the object because of the nature of the object or of the circum-
stances.
This slightly strained analogy allows Aquinas to say that it is possible
for us to see an object in a different way, and even to see “something” dif-
ferent, even though we are looking at the same thing. We have different

56. The analogy is difficult to follow. Aquinas writes that the color of an object can be in
actu or not. The sense seems to be that the surface of an object can be illuminated and visible,
or in darkness and therefore invisible. I have translated the texts quite freely with this mean-
ing in mind.
57. ST I-II.10:2c.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 141

apprehensions not because the formal specification given to sight by the

color of the object changes, but because the nature of the attention given
by the subject changes. So there is a real difference in what is seen that de-
pends on the subject who sees even though what is seen is still specified
solely by the object itself. Aquinas is struggling to express how a change in
the subject can bring about a change in what is perceived without under-
mining the objective nature of the perception. Having made these distinc-
tions in this example from the world of sensation, Aquinas then applies
them to the powers of the soul.
Now just as illuminated colour is the object of sight, so is good the object of the
will. Wherefore if the will be offered an object which is good universally and
from every point of view, the will tends to it of necessity, if it wills anything at
all; since it cannot will the opposite. If, on the other hand, the will is offered an
object that is not good from every point of view [quod non secundum quamli-
bet considerationem sit bonum], it will not tend to it of necessity. And since lack
of any good whatever brings an aspect of non-good [quia defectus cuiuscumque
boni habet rationem non boni], consequently, that good alone which is perfect
and lacking in nothing, is such a good that the will cannot not-will it, and this is
Happiness. Whereas any other particular goods, in so far as they are lacking in
some good, can be regarded as non-goods [inquantum deficiunt ab aliquo bono,
possunt accipi ut non bona], and from this point of view, they can be set aside
or approved by the will, which can tend to one and the same thing from various
points of view [secundum diversas considerationes].58

The same thought is present in De malo 6:

If, however, there is a good of such a nature that it is not found to be good ac-
cording to all the particular aspects that can be considered [non inveniatur esse
bonum secundum omnia particularia que considerari possunt], it [the will] will
not be moved of necessity even in regard to the determination of the act: for a
person will be able to will its opposite, even while thinking about it, since per-
haps it [the opposite] is good or fitting according to some other particular con-
sideration; as, for instance, what is good for health is not good so far as enjoy-
ment is concerned, and so on in regard to other things.59

58. ST I-II.10:2c.
59. DM 6c [441–49].
142 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

We have here one of the most striking conclusions from the discussion so
far: Any other particular goods, insofar as they are lacking in some good, can
be regarded as nongoods. This is going to be the foundation of Aquinas’s
defense of freedom in chapter 6. It’s easy to think of examples. We look at a
cake and can consider either how tasty it is or how fattening it is; we inves-
tigate a new business venture and can consider either the benefits it could
bring or the financial risks it presents; we bump into a friend and can call
to mind either her past generosity or her past impatience. Our response in
each situation will be determined by the specific consideration we make,
and not just by the object in view. The important thing to realize is that in
each example the intellect can see both points of view. Both are true. Both
truths are specified by the object. It is as if there are two rival acts of the in-
tellect, two potential thoughts. But in fact they are both held at the same
time. Either truth can be set aside or approved by the will. When the will
does approve one truth it is not determining what is true, it is determin-
ing that a truth shall be noticed, by exercising a specific act of the intellect.
The will is not determining what is good, it is determining which aspect of
the good is understood. The reflexivity of the powers of the soul is essential
here, since the will is exercising and so controlling the act of the intellect
and not the specification of the good.
It is important to appreciate the significance of what Aquinas is doing
here. He is trying to find a third way between intellectualism and volunta-
rism. Let us take each of these in turn. (A) Intellectualism: If the specifica-
tion of the good depends solely on the object and our intellectual appre-
hension of that object, then the will must inevitably follow that good. It has
no leeway, it cannot reinterpret the good, since the intellect is formed by
the object alone. Intellectualism leads to determinism. (B) Voluntarism: If,
alternatively, the will can specify what is good without being bound by our
intellectual apprehension of the object, then we will certainly have more
control over our goals and our actions, but our desires will not be rooted
in the objectively apprehended reality of the world. Voluntarism leads to
irrationalism. (C) Aquinas’s Third Way: If, however, we can apprehend
with our intellect a single object but view that object in different ways, the
different views might attract or repel us in different ways. Intellectual de-
terminism is avoided, because we are freely choosing to see this aspect of
something rather than another aspect, and our actions will depend on our
willingness to attend to the goodness of one aspect or the other. Equally,
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 143

an irrational voluntarism is avoided because the nature of the aspect of

the good which is seen depends solely on the specification provided by the
object as it forms the intellect. In other words, what we desire is actually
good. The will does not specify the good, it simply determines that one as-
pect of the good can or cannot be specified. The will determines the per-
spective in which the objectively determined good is seen.
These themes are deepened in ST I-II.13:6. Aquinas is writing about the
freedom to choose. The body of the article reinforces the argument about
perspective from 10:2, and explains how it is the reason that allows us to al-
ter our point of view (our “consideration”). Human beings can will and not
will, act and not act; and they can will this or that, and do this or that. This
is possible because of the power of reason, which apprehends the good to-
ward which the will tends. Surely, we assume, this apprehension depends
on the object? Aquinas’s answer is double-edged. The perfect good alone
is always apprehended as good by the reason, since it lacks nothing, and it
is therefore not possible to take a point of view on it (a “perspective”) that
would reveal it to be not-good. However:
[Reason], in all particular goods, can consider the aspect of some good [potest
considerare rationem boni alicuius], and the lack of some good (which has the
aspect of evil), and in this respect it can apprehend any single one of such goods
as to be chosen or to be avoided [potest unumquodque huiusmodi bonorum ap-
prehendere ut eligibile, vel fugibile].60

So the reason changes its consideration and in this way the will is brought
to seek a certain good. It is usually a bad thing, for example, to be cut open
with a knife, but the patient accepts this at the hands of the surgeon who is
trying to remove a tumor. The farmer wants to rejoice when it rains after a
long drought but he is sad that the school sports day is ruined. A child falls
into a surging river and a stranger hesitates on the bank, thinking alterna-
tively of the danger of jumping in and of the duty of helping. This does not
mean that human beings can change their final good, which is always the
complete perfection of happiness. The particular goods that we are reinter-
preting at any moment are always a means to our ultimate end. The neces-
sity of our final end is one element of Aquinas’s scheme that saves it from
circularity and absurdity. Yet in each example the particular good under

60. ST I-II.13:6.
144 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

consideration will only be appreciated and sought if the will wants to con-
sider it.
These two articles from Part I-II allow Aquinas to draw a startling con-
clusion. Every single particular good can be freely apprehended as not-
good, without compromising in any way the objectivity of good and the
openness of the intellect to truth. Every single particular good can thus be
willed or not willed, depending on the point of view we take on it.

An Example: People in a Station

Aquinas has come to a number of conclusions: Understanding in general
has to be willed. Every particular act of understanding has to be willed. Ev-
ery object can be seen from different perspectives. Every good object can
be seen to be bad in certain respects. An object can only be willed if it is
seen to be good. It can only be seen to be good if the will approves and ex-
ercises this act of understanding it as good. This means that we cannot un-
derstand anything unless we think it is good to understand it, and that we
will refuse to understand if we think that this understanding is bad for us.
So our understanding of the world is entirely dependent on what we think
is good for us, which is in turn dependent on the overall orientation of our
lives to a final goal. We only see “what we want to see.” Yet it bears repeat-
ing the proviso Aquinas has already made. It is the good of the act of un-
derstanding this object (an internal, reflexive good) that is at issue here,
not the good of the object which is understood (which is determined en-
tirely by the being of the object as apprehended by the intellect).
We can imagine an example. Five people are waiting in a station. One
has an important exam the next day and is completely caught up in revis-
ing some texts. Another is daydreaming and oblivious to the surround-
ings. We can ignore these first two characters now. They have no interest at
all in their environment. Their understanding, as far as it concerns the sta-
tion, is not being exercised at all. The “world” of the station does not even
figure in their conscious lives.
So we are left with three people who are alert and aware of their sur-
roundings. They look around the same space but all notice different things.
One surveys the architecture, another looks at the clothes of those milling
around, another stares at the clock. This has nothing to do with whether the
architecture is good or the clothes attractive. They look at different things
because they have different interests. They have different views about what it
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 145

is good to be interested in. They see different worlds, and the type of world
they see depends on the type of world they want to see, even though the ac-
tual building or clothes or time they discover is determined by the nature of
what they find in this world.
If they all look at the clock at the same time, will they see the same
time? Of course they will. But they will only look at the clock if they have
a reason to, and so their common discovery of a common time in a shared
world will only take place if their individual interests converge on the
same “object” (which is “the clock as timekeeper” and not just “the clock
as beautiful object”). This is true even if their reasons for wanting to know
the time are different. So the commonness of the time is not some neu-
tral reality that unites them despite their disparate interests—it only unites
them if their interests unite them around this common subject.
Is it possible for something to capture their attention and unite them
in a commonly understood world? Is it possible to take them outside the
realms of their personal interests? It might seem so, but this would be de-
ceptive. Say that a passing stranger screams and falls to the ground clutch-
ing her heart, and all three of them look to see what is happening. It’s true
that something outside their immediate interests has caught their atten-
tion, but it is not divorced from their wider personal interests. They have
an interest in paying attention to unexpected disturbances in public places
for the sake of their own safety, or a concern for their fellow human be-
ings, or a curiosity about the unknown. These interests are not impersonal
and they are certainly not universal. There may be others in the station
who don’t “notice” the sound of screaming for different reasons. Some may
have learnt to filter out inconvenient sounds, perhaps because of a deep
selfishness; others may have lived in a war zone, which made them im-
mune to signs of human suffering; others may have chosen to listen to mu-
sic on headphones with the express purpose of insulating themselves from
their environment.
Once they are looking toward the scene, the three are not united in
a neutral world that has startled them away from their personal worlds,
rather they are brought together by a common interest, which is to an-
swer the question “How shall I respond to this?” Suddenly they share the
same conception of what is good: “It is good to understand what has hap-
pened and decide how I should react.” We can only understand something
if we want to understand it. How do they react to the same situation? One
146 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

goes to help, another opens the newspaper, another pulls out a camera and
starts to take photographs. They see the same situation but their personal
interests determine which aspect of the situation they see: they see it from
different perspectives. This is stronger than saying that they interpret the
same thing in different ways. They actually see different things. One sees a
sick person who needs help; another sees a growing crowd of people that
might delay the train; another sees a journalistic scoop for a local news-
paper. All these things are true, they are specifications made by the object
and apprehended by the intellect, and in theory any human being could
understand the same truth. But in Aquinas’s scheme, we can’t understand
anything unless we think it is good to understand this thing, and unless we
are attracted to this way of understanding.
There are no neutral descriptions of what has happened. Even the
seemingly objective statement “This person has had a heart attack” is a
medical description that requires a commitment to a certain worldview.
If everyone in the station adopts the medical point of view and shares in
the interests of medics, then of course everyone can understand this de-
scription and enter this world. But there is no medical understanding
without a medical interest, and one could take alternative scientific view-
points on the same incident that would reflect different interests: acousti-
cians, for example, could study the sound of the scream, physicists the fall
of the body. In other words, there is no such thing as purely neutral knowl-
edge. Knowledge without an interested, attentive, motivated knower is not
knowledge at all.
The three characters in this example think and observe and act in dif-
ferent ways because their intellects consider a common object (the station,
the collapsed person) in different ways. This in turn depends on the fact
that the will commands the exercise of the intellectual act. Human beings
have to allow themselves to start thinking and to continue thinking along
a certain line of thought, even though the understanding itself is specified
by the object under consideration. This act of the will is the foundation of
all reasoning, and it saves Aquinas from an intellectual determinism that
would insist there is only one way in which a given object or circumstance
can specify our good.
The root of liberty is the will (which is where freedom lies [sicut subiectum]) but
it is the reason that is its cause. For the will can tend freely towards a variety of
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 147
things, because the reason can have various conceptions of good [voluntas libere
potest ad diversa ferri, quia ratio potest habere diversas conceptiones boni].61

Aquinas is not a “compatibilist,” one who believes that accounts of vol-

untary action are compatible with deterministic causal explanations.62 Da-
vid Gallagher draws attention to the reflexive roots of Aquinas’s thinking
on this matter. It is not enough to assert that the will can be moved with-
out necessity by a number of alternative particular goods presented to it by
the intellect. The crucial question is “how the intellect comes to consider
an object in one way and not in another such that the will’s act with respect
to the object is specified as it is.”63 How, in other words, do we choose to
dwell on one good rather than another? We do this by willing the consider-
ation of this good (a reflexive act), which has to take place “before” we will
this good (an act in the world). This two-stage explanation can seem to be a
form of compatibilism, because our action in the world (the second stage)
is determined solely by the good that is understood. The will necessarily
moves toward the good that is understood in the world, which seems like
a form of determinism. The decisive factor, however, is that the consider-
ation of this good (the first stage) has to be willed. This willing is a reflexive
movement that depends on the soul’s ability to observe and judge its own
acts. Our willingness to consider this good is not determined in any way
by the objective nature of the good itself, which is why Aquinas’s account is
not compatible with determinism. Gallagher summarizes this clearly:
The exercise of the intellect’s act is something voluntary. I may think of the util-
ity of a murder and suppress the thought of its wickedness, or I may consider it
in the opposite way. According as the intellect considers an action one way or
another it will judge it to be either good or bad. But whether or not it considers
one way or another is determined by the will. This is where the will’s capacity
either to command or to stop the exercise of reason is decisive. The judgment
of an action’s goodness or evil depends on how the agent considers it, and this
consideration falls under the control of the will. [.....] An act of choice is speci-
fied by the object which reason supplies. But which object reason supplies, or

61. ST I-II.17:1ad2.
62. See Norman Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aqui-
nas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 147–48.
63. Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” 266.
148 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g
better, under which aspect a particular action is judged, depends upon how the
will exercises the intellect’s act in its regard.64

Aquinas’s genius lies in the fact that he locates freedom in the reflexive
procedures that establish how the world is understood. Once this world is
established, with its presently understood goods, he never needs to argue
that the will asserts its “voluntariness” or “freedom” by going against what
it understands to be good. Aquinas preserves the twin foundations of a
“deterministic” intellectual specification of what is good and a “voluntaris-
tic” exercise of the particular consideration that allows this specification.
He holds onto his cake and eats it too.
All this begs a series of further questions: What is the reason for want-
ing to understand something in one way rather than another? What makes
the will approve of one intellectual perspective and so notice one good
rather than another? What, in other words, is the ultimate foundation of
willing and understanding that saves Aquinas’s system from circularity?
These questions bring us to the issue of freedom, which will be discussed
properly in chapter 6.

Understanding as a Subjective Objectivity

Each aspect of Sartre’s “human world” is mirrored in Aquinas’s account of
the reflexivity of intellect and will. (A) Sartre says that the world of experi-
ence as such is only brought to light by the purposeful involvement of be-
ing-for-itself. Aquinas says that there must be an initial willingness of the
will to understand anything at all. Even before the world reveals its particu-
larities this general willingness gives a certain shape and rhythm to the ap-
pearance of the world, which depends on one’s desire for truth and under-
standing. At any moment the will can think or not think about anything at
all, for many different reasons. The pattern of thinking and not thinking
decides the pattern of the appearance of the world. (B) Sartre says that hu-
man beings determine exactly which objects are given their attention. Their
interests decide which “figures” will emerge from a field of possible under-
standing and which will recede into the “background.” In Aquinas this is
the willingness of the will to see some types of understanding as “good” and
worthy of interest and to ignore others. We cannot understand anything

64. Ibid., 267.

 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 149

unless we value the activity of understanding in question. Any good can be

seen as not-good from a certain perspective, and any act of understanding
can be seen as not-good from a certain perspective. (C) Sartre wrote about
paying attention either to the roughness of the green peel or the green of
the rough peel—these properties stand like figures against a background.
Aquinas would agree that our understanding of any one kind of property
is a good that must be sought by the will. The multifarious properties and
characteristics of any object reveal themselves only if someone is interested
in them.
For Aquinas, as for Sartre, every single thing understood is objective—
whether we are considering the world as a whole, the objects within it,
their orientation within its structure, or their characteristics. Our under-
standing is specified by the nature of what is understood. Yet this objectiv-
ity is only revealed through the interests of human beings, through the ac-
tivation of the will as we seek specific, concrete goods (including the goods
of understanding) in our quest for our ultimate good. The objective resis-
tance of things is only met through the pressure of purposeful activity.
Objectivity, we could say, is subjective. We don’t need to pretend that
we stand in some neutral space outside our personal experience in order
to begin the process of understanding the objective world. We act within
a culture and a language, guided by a set of personal and communal goals,
and as we act we come up against the objective. This is against the view,
held with such force by someone like Karl Popper, that objective under-
standing is somehow adulterated by the presence of the subject. He went
to great lengths to protect scientific knowledge from the errors of psychol-
ogism and could even assert that some forms of knowledge are totally in-
dependent of anyone’s claim to know. “Knowledge in the objective sense is
knowledge without a knower: it is knowledge without a knowing subject.”65
Aquinas, through his Averroist adversaries, confronted an analogous
philosophical project to Popper’s and took it seriously. The so-called Aver-
roists argued, broadly speaking, that if a common truth is understood and

65. Karl R. Popper, “Epistemology without a Knowing Subject,” in Objective Knowledge,

an Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 109. On the other hand, Popper’s
view connects with Sartre’s convictions about the transparency and impersonality of unreflec-
tive consciousness and Aquinas’s understanding of the openness of the intellect to the forms
of other things.
150 = h u m a n u n d e r s ta n d i n g

shared by diverse people it must be because a unique, separate intellect is

shared.66 In other words, if there is one objective truth it must be that there
is only one way of knowing it, which implies that there is only one intellect
that understands. They believed that there can only be one way of knowing
the one truth, and the individual knowing subject must not get in the way.
We can glimpse the way Aquinas responds in a short passage from De uni-
tate intellectus contra averroistas, chapter 5:
It is therefore one thing which is understood both by me and by you. But it is
understood by me in one way and by you in another, that is, by another intelli-
gible species. And my understanding is one thing, and yours, another; and my
intellect is one thing, and yours, another.67

Aquinas, like Sartre, thus makes understanding radically personal, without

losing the objectivity of truth. We have to make things true in the sense
that all understanding is something we have to do. Understanding is an
act that has to be done for an end. What matters is how we conceive the
world to be, where “conception” can imply both “thinking about what is”
and “creating something new” (as in the conception of a baby). Invenire
is another word that provides a useful double meaning: in contemporary
English “to discover” and “to invent” have opposing senses, but in Latin a
single word stands for both.
Aquinas and Sartre each emphasize the constructive work that needs
to be done by each individual intellect in order to place the truth of things
in the perspective of human understanding. Truth is not just found, ready-
made—it has to be personalized. To think that we have to become more
detached in order to become more objective is an illusion, in any area of
understanding. Yet this is in no way a denial of universality or objectivity,
because the truth gained by each person is the truth of things. The subjec-
tive element does not blur but reveals the being of things. The ontological

66. See, e.g., Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works, 250–54, and
Edward P Mahoney, “Aquinas’s Critique of Averroes’ Doctrine of the Unity of the Intellect,” in
Thomas Aquinas and His Legacy, ed. David M. Gallagher, Studies in Philosophy and the Histo-
ry of Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994).
67. Thomas Aquinas, “De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas,” in Sancti Thomae De
Aquino Opera Omnia, Iussu Empensaque Leonis XIII P. M. Edita, vol. 43 (Rome:Editori di San
Tommaso, 1976). For an English translation, see Thomas Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect
against the Averroists, trans. Beatrice H. Zedler (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press,
1968), chapter 5, #112.
 u n d e r s ta n d i n g i n a q u i n a s = 151

priority of things is what founds the universality of our particular modes

of understanding. It is not the unicity of the intellect that guarantees the
shared objectivity of truth, as the Averroists believed, but the unicity of the
world as understood in different ways.
It will become clearer in the next two chapters how in both philoso-
phers this personal construction of truth is the foundation for human free-
dom and responsibility. We are free to act because we are free to under-
stand the world in different ways. If one starts with the assumption that
there is only a single (and therefore determined) way of understanding the
world common to all human beings, one’s view of freedom will inevitably
become voluntaristic. This is because freely made personal preferences, if
they are not linked to a personalized understanding of the world, must
therefore be made by an irrational will that turns against the shared and
determined understanding.
In one sense, Aquinas would say, people live in the same “world” be-
cause the being that specifies what they understand is the same being, and
their interests are always capable of overlapping and coinciding and deter-
mining that they understand this same being. In another sense, people live
in different “worlds” since their interests vary slightly, or greatly, and they
are forever understanding different aspects of different things for different
purposes. This is why Aquinas could agree with Sartre when he writes:
Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute, and there is a truth of knowl-
edge. But this truth, although releasing to us nothing more and nothing less
than the absolute, remains strictly human.68

Truth, according to Aquinas and Sartre, is not found by trying to escape

from our personal interests. These interests give us a purchase on truth.
Knowledge depends on desire, on love. If we come to share a larger truth it
is because our interests and love have expanded and not because we have
abandoned them for some impersonal neutrality.

68. BN 218; EN 255/270.

 Part Three

H u ma n F r e e dom
 Chapter 5

F r e e d o m , C h oic e , a n d t h e
I n d e t e r m i nat io n of R e a s o n i n S a r t r e

The Intentional Structure of the Act

Sartre and Aquinas, as we found in part one, have a shared un-
derstanding of how human identity is constituted by the free
choices human beings make. We create ourselves and establish
our goals through our actions, and these actions are not deter-
mined by any preexisting self. In part two we learnt how both
thinkers believe that our interests and purposes determine how
we understand the world, yet this personalised understanding
still makes us present to a truth that is other than us. The sub-
jective perspective we bring to things reveals their objectivity.
Now in part three we need to ask about the foundation of this
whole process of acting and understanding. What is happen-
ing when we act? Why do we choose to act in one way rather
than another? How can our choices have any rational founda-
tion if our understanding is itself based on our choices? What,
in other words, is the nature of human freedom? In this chap-
ter we can look more closely at Sartre’s analysis of the human
act and at the projection of ends that establishes the act.
The first chapter of Being and Nothingness part 4 concerns
freedom. Sartre makes explicit the structure of the human act.
The defining feature of a human act is that it is intentional,
which means that it is for the sake of a known end.1 We know

1. BN 433; EN 477/508.

155
156 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

what we are doing in this act (even if we are doing other things at the same
time); we foresee a certain result (even if there may be other unforeseen
results too); and we try to bring about this result (even if we do not suc-
ceed). Sartre gives the example of an explosion at a quarry which was an
act (and not just an accident) because the worker “intentionally realized
a conscious project” when he set off the dynamite.2 He wanted to achieve
this end, unlike another worker who carelessly discarded a cigarette and
unintentionally set off another explosion. An intention involves an ac-
tive commitment toward an end, a first step toward its realisation (this is
what distinguishes it from a dream or a wish), even if it is not achieved.
The prisoner, by trying in some way to escape, learns that he has an inten-
tion and not a mere wish to escape.3 In this dynamic structure of inten-
tion there are always three inseparable aspects: (A) each act (B) has an end
(C) that refers to a motive.4 These aspects relate to the structure of tempo-
rality: (A) each act in the present (B) takes place for the sake of a future
(C) which makes sense of and fulfills a past.5 So this is the structure of in-
tention: motive-act-end.
Sartre dismisses the idea that human actions, in order to be free, need to
be without motives. Proponents of this view “can only end up by rendering
the act absurd.”6 We should note from the start Sartre’s opposition to a view
of freedom in which free acts are gratuitous and arise without explanation
and without reference to one’s convictions or values. He has more sympathy
with determinists who stress the role of prior motives and believe that acts
arise quite predictably if a certain person is in a certain situation. But the
problem with deterministic philosophies (and with much of our everyday
thinking) is that they reify motives. Motives are treated as brute, incontro-
vertible facts that drive the human being in a predetermined direction. De-

2. BN 433; EN 477/508.
3. BN 483–84; EN 529/563–64. John Atwell writes that “for Sartre it is not self-contradic-
tory to say ‘I intended to do X, but I didn’t do it’; but it is self-contradictory to say ‘I intended
to do X, but I didn’t do anything toward doing (i.e., accomplishing) X.’ ”; see John E. Atwell,
“Sartre and Action Theory,” in Jean Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy,
ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Frederick A. Elliston (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press,
1980), 72.
4. Here I use the English word “motive” to stand for the complex of objectively found mo-
tives (motifs) and subjectively felt motivations (mobiles) which seem to “cause” an action. The
distinctions are not important at this stage. See BN 446; EN 491/522–23.
5. BN 436–37; EN 480–81/511–12.
6. BN 437; EN 481/512.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 157

terminists extrapolate from these “psychic givens” and assume that there is
an unbroken continuity between the motive, the act, and the end.7 In deter-
ministic psychological theories, for example, Gustave Flaubert’s whole life
and work might be explained in terms of his innate ambition—as if the dis-
covery of this “ambition” left nothing else to be said.8
In Sartre’s eyes the fundamental mistake is to assume that “the moti-
vation provokes the act as the physical cause its effect.” In this false view
“everything is real, everything is full”; “motive, act, and end constitute a
‘continuum,’ a plenum.”9 This is the misconception we looked at in chap-
ter 1, where one’s identity and one’s values are taken to be indisputable fea-
tures of reality which generate a certain pattern of events. Sartre argues
that factual states of affairs cannot by themselves give rise to values that
would necessitate action. He exposes the contradictions inherent in a de-
terministic appeal to motives. He argues that since motives understood as
motives must be objects of our reflective consciousness, they must there-
fore be questionable. If we are reflecting on them, then we are able to hold
them at a distance, and their power automatically to direct our conscious
acts is nullified. This, once again, is the experience of anguish.
In Sartre’s view a motive is not discovered before the act, it is consti-
tuted by the act. In the formulation of each act, there is a necessary mo-
ment of negation. The agent must recognize an end, a “desideratum,” whose
counterpart is an “objective lack” or “négatité.”10 We must go beyond the de-
termined facts in front of us and decide what is missing and what could be
desired. The emperor Constantine, for example, as we saw in chapter 1, con-
ceives of the establishment of a new Christian city in the East of his empire
to counter the decadence of Rome. This decadence is only revealed to be a
lack that motivates if it is held up against a projected ideal. Nothing in the
city of Rome by itself actually constitutes a motive and prompts the projec-
tion of a new city. A motive lies in the realm of “nonbeing,” that is, it cannot
be discovered in the being of the world.
From the moment of the first conception of the act, consciousness has been able
to withdraw itself from the full world of which it is consciousness and leave the
level of being in order frankly to approach that of non-being.11

7. See BN 440; EN 484/515–16. 8. See BN 560; EN 605/646.

9. BN 440; EN 484/516. 10. BN 433; EN 478/508.
11. BN 434; EN 478/509.
158 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

The possibility of a new city that does not exist is what reveals that the
old city is lacking something, and Constantine’s consciousness of this moti-
vation, his dissatisfaction with the decadence of Rome, is inseparable from
his projection of a new possibility. Before the new ideal came to mind the
“decadence” of Rome was just considered to be an ordinary and acceptable
part of urban life. Similarly, a worker in the oppressive conditions of early
nineteenth-century Lyon does not necessarily see his suffering as a motive
for action. He has no contemplative distance from suffering and cannot
understand it as good or bad—it just is. “To suffer and to be are one and
the same for him.”12 His suffering only becomes a motive when he is able
to envisage a better future that does not exist. The projection of an ideal
society achieved by revolution is what allows him to see that his present
situation is not what it could be. There is a double negation here: a future
that is not the present (and which cannot be extrapolated from the present
with any necessity) and a present that is not this future. Sartre draws two
conclusions, one about the act, another about the work of consciousness,
and these shed some light on his understanding of freedom:
(1) No factual state whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of
society, the psychological “state,” etc.) is capable by itself of motivating any act
whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and
that which is [ce qui est] can in no way determine by itself that which is not.
(2) No factual state can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a négatité or
as a lack. Better yet no factual state can determine consciousness to define it and
to circumscribe it [as an isolated system].13

We saw in chapter 3 that the very identification of a specific object of

interest depends on negation. Now we see that negation also underlies the
identification of any lack. Both these processes are one with the movement
of consciousness as it withdraws from the “plenitude of being” (plénitude
d’être) of the historical situation in which it is immersed, isolates a single
object of attention, and surpasses it toward an ideal.14 Consciousness can
effect a rupture with its past and present and give them a meaning by re-
lating them to a projected future. This is how, from a great range of poten-
tially motivating factors, a single one is actually given priority and experi-

12. BN 435; EN 479/510. 13. BN 435–36; EN 479–80/511.

14. BN 434; EN 479/510.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 159

enced as a motive. “The motivation is understood only by the end; that is,
by the non-existent.”15

Indetermination and the Projection of Ends

Given that every act is motivated, and that the notion of an unmotivated
human act is absurd, Sartre’s description could seem like a form of deter-
minism. Sartre, it seems, would be able to draw a causal line back from any
action to the circumstances that preceded it—whether these were objec-
tive motives in the world or subjective motivations in the mind and heart
of the agent.
It is true that we can draw a causal line back from any initiated action
to its prior causes. The crucial point to make, however, is that we cannot
draw a causal line forward from a present set of circumstances to the ini-
tiation of a future action.16 Insofar as we are aware of multiple possible
meanings and futures, then we are by definition in a state of indetermina-
tion. Anguish is the realization that our circumstances do not determine
our understanding or values or actions. There is a gap, a need to interpret
and choose and act, and this makes us aware of our freedom. By insisting
otherwise the determinist ignores the experience of anguish and brings a
prejudice to the phenomenological evidence.
The indetermination we experience is that of not knowing how to think
about the future. The totality of our experience does not provide enough.
We experience an awareness simultaneously of two (or more) possibilities,
two directions in which everything could go, two interpretations of this to-
tality, two motives. We can, for example, give away the cash or keep it for
ourselves, we can be polite or be rude, we can propose in marriage or es-
cape to New Zealand.17 With all the facts at our fingertips we are conscious
that there is still a choice to make. This is a primary and irreducible expe-
rience for Sartre. His whole philosophy stands or falls by the truth of this
experience: that when we observe and assess the totality of what is within
view of our consciousness, we cannot discover a necessary meaning, a de-

15. BN 437; EN 481/512.

16. In this regard, as John Atwell believes, Sartre should be associated with those twen-
tieth-century action theorists who draw attention to the impossibility of characterizing an
agent’s goals as causal events that exist prior to an action; see Atwell, “Sartre and Action The-
ory,” 63–66.
17. These are my examples, not Sartre’s.
160 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

termined future, an inevitable course of action. Everything depends on the

relation of the totality to an end, and an end simply cannot be found. This
is not because we do not yet know enough. However much or little we
know there is always, by definition, a wider context, an ideal one, that will
frame the whole and provide for its interpretation. We have a direct expe-
rience of not experiencing a single ideal, a single end.
Sartre’s position is not undermined if a determinist points out that
there are hidden causes or unobservable details that are influencing the fu-
ture outcome of events. This is because “external” events, even those within
our psyche, are different from intentional acts. Sartre never suggests, for
example, that human beings are unable to make predictions about chem-
ical reactions or planetary orbits on the basis of scientific knowledge. It
is the subjective, internal, phenomenological future that concerns him. In
the experience of anguish we are simply unable to discover what our future
will be, what will be the future for which we are now responsible through
our intentional acts. We experience the lack of a predetermined future.
This is enough to establish human freedom. Indeterminism is not a theory
about the mechanics of the universe, it is an experience, and it is insepara-
ble from consciousness itself.
It is by the choice of one end out of many that an action is determined.
By acting we allow the present to be determined by one future rather than
another one. Freedom is the foundation of all human activity and of all the
reasons, motives, and values that arise through that activity. No determin-
istic description of human action can account for the surpassing of what is
that lies at the center of all distinctively human behavior. The heart of be-
ing human is transcending the given and turning it toward a freely chosen
future. The oppressed worker already mentioned above can interpret his
suffering in two ways: as a natural and unavoidable part of a cosmic or-
der, or as a prelude to a revolution. Neither thought is demanded by his
circumstances, neither is necessary. His circumstances become a motive
(for inaction or for action) only because the worker can distance himself
from his circumstances and understand the whole in the light of some-
thing greater.
This implies for consciousness the permanent possibility of effecting a rupture
with its own past, of wrenching itself away from its past so as to be able to con-
sider it in the light of a non-being and so as to be able to confer on it the mean-
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 161
ing which it has in terms of the project of a meaning which it does not have.
Under no circumstances can the past in any way by itself produce an act; that is,
the positing of an end which turns back upon itself so as to illuminate it.18

The peculiar status of the end is what preserves the whole scheme from
determinism. An end is something that influences the interpretation of
these circumstances even though it exists only in our intention and not in
reality. Circumstances produce results, not ends. Ends, on the other hand,
produce circumstances, or at least they change the relationship which the
circumstances have with the future. This effects a change in the meaning
and orientation of the circumstances themselves. Ends, values, motives,
and meanings are not found in the world but only in the understanding of
a being-for-itself that can conceive of a world beyond the world of imme-
diate experience.
Ends are not, as Sartre writes, ready made and prehuman, coming
“from God, from nature, from ‘my’ nature, from society.”19 Even the “im-
pulsive” decision to save one’s life and flee from mortal danger requires a
commitment to the value of one’s life, which is a commitment not every-
one chooses to make.20 The goal, however fixed it seems, is always chosen,
if it is a conscious intention that forms part of a human act. We cannot re-
ceive our ends, “either from outside or from a so-called inner ‘nature.’ ”21
If we are acting, if we are seeking to bring about a particular future, then
we must have at least some reflective awareness that this future is not fixed
and does not arise inevitably from our present. The fact that we can ask
“What am I doing? What am I seeking to achieve here?” shows that we are
conscious of the lack of necessity about our goal and our distance from it.
In Sartre’s scheme we can only act if we realize that the end is not given to
us in our present experience. The condition of intentional action is that we
are simultaneously aware of the end as a reason for acting and of the end
as a value that we freely choose to sustain. Human reality is unavoidably

18. BN 436; EN 480/511. 19. BN 440; EN 484/516.

20. BN 443; EN 487–88/519–20.
21. BN 443; EN 488/519. This sounds very different from the Thomistic view, but we must
remember that for Sartre a possible goal only becomes an “end” once it has been chosen and
incorporated into the structure of an act. Aquinas is certainly aware of the goods to which all
human beings are naturally attracted (such as existence, life, and knowledge), but he insists at
the same time that the will is not determined to any particular goods. In this sense, he could
agree with Sartre that we cannot “receive” our ends as actual ends but only as possible ends. See
chapter 6 below, in the section “The Indetermination of Particular Goods.”
162 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

aware of its role in choosing the ends that guide its activity. “It chooses
them and by this very choice confers upon them a transcendent existence
as the external limit of its projects.”22
Sartre does not imagine that we are always in the process of establish-
ing new ends. We are often doing things in the present that we decided
to do in the past. We often take for granted a prior motive.23 This is what
gives continuity to each human life. But if we are conscious of and present
to this motive, then like all intentional objects it becomes separated from
us by a nothingness. “It can act only if it is recovered; in itself it is without
force.”24 All motives, all values, all ends—however definitive we took them
to be in the past—need to have a value continually conferred on them in
the present. Their past meaning needs to be maintained in existence, or re-
jected, or appreciated in a new way. The end we choose now is absolutely
decisive for our interpretation of all that has influenced us in the past. The
French word sens is useful because it signifies both “meaning” and “direc-
tion.” Sartre writes that it is the meaning/direction of the past (which in-
cludes our past motives and values) that must be decided by us at each
moment. “I decide it precisely and only by the very act by which I pro-ject
myself toward my ends [je me pro-jette vers mes fins].”25
Sartre argues that ends are chosen even when we react to a situation in
what seems to be an impulsive, unreflective, emotional manner. Emotions,
for Sartre, are intentional—they make up part of our project and we allow
them to steer us toward freely chosen ends. It does not make a difference
for Sartre whether the end we project is grasped by the will in a deliber-
ated, reflective mode, or by the passions in an emotional, symbolic mode.
In both cases we are freely choosing how to respond to the world and to
go beyond it toward certain values.26 It does not matter whether we un-
derstand the reason for acting to be an objective motif (“motive”) discov-
ered in the facts of the world or a subjective mobile (“motivation”) lying in
our desires and emotions. Each reflects in its own way a value projected by
freedom.27 “Motives and motivations have only the weight which my proj-
ect—that is, the free production of the end and of the known act to be real-
ized—confers upon them.”28

22. BN 443; EN 488/520. 23. BN 449–50; EN 493/525.

24. BN 450; EN 494/527. 25. BN 450; EN 495/527.
26. BN 441–45; EN 485–89/516–21. 27. BN 445–51; EN 489–95/521–27.
28. BN 450–51; EN 495/527.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 163

Choice and Self-Constitution

So, given any act, we will discover motives and ends, and there will a kind
of necessity about the elements within the whole process. We might say
of someone: “Of course this person, with these values, in these circum-
stances, with these motives, acted in this way.” But this deterministic de-
scription doesn’t go far enough. It fails to explain the existence of the total
process. It assumes without evidence that the circumstances of the world
and the nature of the agent provided for only one course of action. It ig-
nores the fact that motives and ends refer to ideals that do not exist in the
facts of the present and that need to be sustained by some negating power.
Before the commencement of the act, these motives have only a theoretical
power and do not actually motivate anything. Motive, act, and end, writes
Sartre, are all constituted in a single upsurge. “But the organized totality of
the three is no longer explained by any structure.”29 In an attempt to find
a foundation for this totality Sartre writes: “It is the act which decides its
ends and its motives, and the act is the expression of freedom.”30 The active
projection of a goal determines the whole process. There is no foundation
outside the act itself. As David Jopling puts it, “[T]his is another way of ar-
riving at the idea that the radical choice is a groundless ground.”31 In other
words, the human act is self-determining.
The young man in Existentialism and Humanism, for example, finds
it impossible to find a definitive reason either for joining the resistance
or caring for his mother.32 He can’t prioritize his motives. Each motive
emerges from a different understanding of his life; each understanding is
incompatible with the other. Jopling writes that in this situation, “the con-
flict of duties, responsibilities, and moral intuitions is ultimately a conflict
between two ways of life, and not a conflict between moral claims within
a single way of life.”33 What we are really concerned with is an explanation
for the whole way of life in which we allow these motives to make sense.

29. BN 438; EN 482/513. 30. BN 438; EN 482/513.

31. David A. Jopling, ”Sartre’s Moral Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre,
ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118.
32. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 41–46,
translated as Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writ-
ings, ed. Stephen Priest (London: Routledge, 2001), 33–34.
33. Jopling, “Sartre’s Moral Psychology,” 119.
164 = h u m a n f r e e d o m
Questions of moral and rational justification are necessarily internal to a way
of life (or to the project or basic moral framework), but as a whole, a way of life
does not afford external rational justification.34

Sartre believes that there “is” no single answer to the young man’s ques-
tion that sits out there in the world of being. The dilemma comes about
for the very reason that there are two incompatible answers that can arise
from the same circumstances. They are incommensurable. Each of them
is “right” in its own terms. The young man’s past does indeed recommend
a future of heroic patriotism, but also of heroic filial piety—and it cannot
in this case recommend both together. Each response would have a ratio-
nal and sufficient motive for the particular response it would motivate. Yet
neither has a greater right than the other to claim the attention of the man
and to become established as a cause of his actions. There are no cross-
project or metaproject reasons that would allow one to compare the two
fundamental options.
Sartre’s advice to the young man in Existentialism and Humanism is
to say, “You’re free, choose, that is, invent.”35 Choose whether to be a duti-
ful citizen or a dutiful son. Personality will be manifested in the priorities
that guide a life, and these priorities are seen here to be a consequence and
not a cause of one’s free decisions. With this word “invent,” inventer, Sartre
draws attention to the creative aspect of choice, which brings about what
would not have existed without the choice. It is an act of origination. Yet
it is also, as the Latin root of inventer (invenire) suggests, an act of discov-
ery, of meeting what is really there. Thomas Flynn explains that the origi-
nal choice at the heart of a decision is “criterion-constituting and hence is
without antecedent reason or necessity.”36 This is not far from Aristotle’s
idea that the reasonableness of any virtuous activity can be fully recog-
nized only from within the practice bounding it, to the eyes of one experi-
enced in and engaged in that activity.37 The active free choice establishes a
structure in which the components (motive-act-end) have a place. Every-

34. Ibid., 118.

35. Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” 34; Sartre, L’Existentialisme Est un Human-
isme, 46, “Vous êtes libre, choisissez, c’est-à-dire inventez.”.
36. Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Re-
sponsibility (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8.
37. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett,
1985), Bk2, 1103a14–09b27; and J. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” The Monist 62 (1976).
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 165

thing within the structure has a meaning, but there is no “external” mean-
ing that will justify the structure itself. “Thinking” cannot work out which
of many incompatible “ways of thinking” is the best. There must be a su-
prarational foundation for a given mode of rationality and action. It is in
this sense that Sartre characterizes choices as “absurd.” He is not just using
audacious language for its own sake.
Choice is not absurd in the sense in which in a rational universe a phenomenon
might arise which would not be bound to others by any reasons. It is absurd in
this sense—that the choice is that by which all foundations and all reasons come
into being [.....] . It is absurd as being beyond all reasons.38

Sartre believes that the “external” foundation of action lies in the ex-
istence of human freedom itself, and he identifies this with the very being
of the for-itself. Questions of action and personhood are inseparable. The
surpassing of identity we looked at in chapter 1 is what founds the totality
“motive-act-end.” “This ensemble is ultimately myself as transcendence; it
is me in so far as I have to be myself outside of me [c’est moi en tant que j’ai
à être moi-même hors de moi].”39 Freedom is not just one of many human
capacities that we happen to activate now and then, it is the “stuff ” (l’étoffe)
of one’s being.
So if we ask the question “Why did we do this rather than that?” or
“Why did we value this rather than that?” the answer refers us to the per-
son we are. And if we ask “Why, though, are we this person?!” there is no
answer beyond the fact that we are becoming this person through our ac-
tions. When Sartre was a conscript testing his ideas about freedom on his
fellow soldiers one of them gently reminded him that he must “take people
as they are,” and his impatient reaction was to say, “Yes, but I know in my
bones that people aren’t, they do.”40 Personhood, as we saw in chapter 1, lies
not in a substantial self that is a cause or explanation of the person, it lies in
the perpetual going beyond the self required by our consciousness of self.
Our human existence is more than our essence. There is nothing more fun-
damental to which we can refer. The only “explanation” for the shape of our
actions and our existence is the fact that our being-for-itself is an original

38. BN 479; EN 524/559.

39. BN 437; EN 481/513.
40. “[.....] les gens ne sont pas, ils font”; Jean-Paul Sartre, Lettres Au Castor, vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1983), 382.
166 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

and irreducible event. It is the single thing (in our phenomenological ex-
perience) that is not caused by something else, because its nature is pre-
cisely to project itself beyond causes toward an end.
For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is [Etre, pour le pour-
soi, c’est néantiser l’en-soi qu’il est]. Under these conditions freedom can be noth-
ing other than this nihilation. It is through this that the for-itself escapes from
its being as it does from its essence; it is through this that the for-itself is always
something other than what can be said of it.41

Sartre thus returns to themes from the beginning of Being and Nothing-
ness. The intentional act that establishes the structure “motive-act-end” is
one with this unavoidable movement beyond identity that constitutes our
very being as self-conscious creatures. So for Sartre these are not different
areas of discussion. The intentional act itself, freedom, being-for-itself, and
the choice of ends are all one thing. The “unjustifiable” adoption of one
course of action is associated with the negation that takes place at the very
heart of human consciousness.42 Freedom is “equivalent to my existence.”43
Each intentional complex of action needs an external foundation, and this
is inseparable from the movement in which we go beyond the present and
relate it to a future that does not exist. We are free to act because we have
to deny our identity and choose how to reconstitute it. “Human reality is
free because it is not enough.”44 It is wrenched away from what it is.
Human beings are free because they are not self but presence to self [L’homme
est libre parce qu’il n’est pas soi mais présence à soi]. The being which is what it is
cannot be free. Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is been [est été] at
the heart of the human being and which forces human-reality to make itself in-
stead of to be. As we have seen, for human reality, to be is to choose oneself.45

So to the ultimate question “Why this choice, this end, this purpose in
life?” there is no answer. This choice, this end, this purpose is the person
who exists in this moment. There is nothing more fundamental to which
we can point. Any other explanation would deny the phenomenological
evidence, which shows that the choice of one’s ends and the constitution of

41. BN 439; EN 483/515. 42. BN 464; EN 509/542.

43. BN 444; EN 488/520. 44. BN 440; EN 485/516.
45. BN 440; EN 485/516.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 167

one’s identity are one with each other, and that they are originating, foun-
dational events that cannot be reduced to anything else. It is not true to
say, “She sought this thing because she is this kind of person.” Sartre would
instead say, “She is this kind of person because she is seeking this thing,”
or better still, “This person is the seeking of this thing; this human being is
the surpassing of this world for the sake of this end.” The choice and pro-
jection of one end, which determines the whole meaning of our life, is not
determined by an already existing personal identity—it is the person who
exists in this moment in relation to this end. There is no Bergsonian “deep
self ” (moi-profond) hidden away somewhere, distinct from the manifesta-
tion of the person that takes place through action.46 Even though Sartre
paid more attention in his later works to the practical limits of freedom
and the influence of one’s environment on the formation of the self, he
never lost this basic philosophical conviction that we determine our being
by going beyond what we are. Ronald Aronson summarizes Sartre’s thesis
in this phrase: “We make ourselves from what has been made of us.”47 In
other words, it is not enough just to be ourselves: we have to adopt our-
selves and take responsibility for who we are becoming. There “are” no
ends; they are not out there waiting to be discovered.
In the search for explanations, there is nowhere further back to go than
the original choice of ends that takes place when we become aware of the in-
conclusiveness of the present. It is foundational and self-constituting since it
is precisely the response we have to make to the insufficiency of all previous
foundations. To put it in a slightly different way: Our free response to the
foundations we discover becomes foundational for the future. A phrase that
became an existentialist slogan (“existence precedes essence”) only makes
proper sense in the context of Being and Nothingness. Sartre refuses to grant
that descriptions of essence can ever account for the freely projected exis-
tence of human beings, where “essence” stands for all that is and “existence”
stands for the dynamic orientation of all that is to what it is not.48

46. BN 444; EN 488/520.

47. Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980), 78.
48. If Sartre concentrates on analyzing the individual, it should become clear that these
categories will help us to understand the developments that take place within a community,
a society, a language, a narrative. In each case an inherited “essence” may be negated and sur-
passed in the light of freely chosen values.
168 = h u m a n f r e e d o m
Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence. Freedom is an up-
surge that is immediately concrete [la liberté est surgissement immédiatement
concret] and is not to be distinguished from its choice; that is, from the person
himself.49

We interpret the present by choosing a future. We act in the world by go-

ing beyond it toward an end. We constitute ourselves by going beyond our-
selves. Freedom is thus one with our existence as conscious human beings.

The Reasonableness of the Project

It is clear, then, that ends are not constituted by the given circumstances.
Sartre is not a determinist, even though he has argued that all actions are
motivated. There is a line from the past to actions that have already begun,
but not yet from the present to future actions. This raises another set of
questions: Is the free choice of each project irrational? Is everything within
each project therefore without rational foundation? Sartre thinks not. He
is not a voluntarist, as we shall see, and each project has its own rational-
ity. Even though he characterizes freedom as an “unanalyzable totality,” he
recoils against the suggestion that it is “a pure capricious, unlawful, gratu-
itous, and incomprehensible contingency.”50
It is interesting to note Sartre’s thoughts about Camus’s novel L’Étranger
in a review of September 1942.51 Sartre comments on the indebtedness of
Camus’s prose style to Hemingway. Events are recorded in short sentences,
without explicit connections, such that their overall significance is opaque
and we are unable to profit from the momentum of the narrative. The iso-
lated phrases of the text communicate the isolated moments experienced
by the protagonist and help the reader to enter into the absurdity of a life
without meaning. Only the immediacy of the present counts. At the end
of the review Sartre confesses himself reluctant to classify Camus’s work as
a novel (un roman) because he believes that in a novel it should be obvi-
ous that time is irreversible. Camus replaces the causal order one expects
to find in a novel with a mere chronological series of incidents. We have
a sense that Sartre feels let down, as if the novelist has a duty to describe
lives that are full of purpose, lives that make sense. There seems to be some
sort of contradiction here: How can Sartre defend his radical view of free-

49. BN 568; EN 613/655. 50. BN 452–53; EN 497–98/529–30.

51. Reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 92–112.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 169

dom and still suggest that there is some kind of overarching meaning to
each human life?
It might be helpful to consider one example of voluntaristic thinking
from the history of philosophy and see how far Sartre’s thinking is from
this. Servais Pinckaers describes the “freedom of indifference” that is pro-
posed by traditions influenced by William of Ockham.52 He contrasts this
voluntaristic view of freedom with a “freedom for excellence” proposed by
Aquinas. For our purposes it doesn’t matter whether Pinckaers is fair to
Ockham or not (or to Aquinas). I am using his presentation of voluntarism
to provide a contrast with Sartre’s position.
“Freedom of indifference” drives a wedge between freedom and rea-
son. Ockham argues that freedom resides in the will, which can respond
to the conclusions of reason by accepting them or rejecting them. Freedom
is an indetermination or a radical indifference in the will regarding con-
traries. Actions are produced in a wholly contingent way without having
any necessary orientation to the good as it has been understood by reason.
Love for the good and rational desire are replaced by a self-determining
domination. Freedom chooses without reference to one’s ultimate goal in
life or to one’s past actions. Decisions take place in an isolated present mo-
ment, disconnected from each other. Pinckaers explicitly mentions Sartre
as a figure who stands (perhaps unconsciously) in this voluntaristic tradi-
tion, although one suspects that he does not know Sartre’s work well.53
There is an order in the voluntaristic system described by Pinckaers.
First we understand the world and ourselves, and then we choose how to
act. The will functions in a context determined by reason and it chooses
whether to accept or reject the good that reason proposes. Freedom deter-
mines what we do, but it does not determine how we think about things or
how we understand the world—it takes this understanding from the rea-
son. If the will chooses against a value assigned by reason, this is not be-
cause the will values this “countervalue,” since it is only the reason that can
judge that something is valuable. There can be no reason for choosing the

52. Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble (Ed-
inburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 330–42.
53. Ignatius Eschmann is another reputable Thomist who uses Sartre as a voluntarist foil
against which he can set the more rational ethics of Aquinas; see Ignatius Theodore Eschmann,
The Ethics of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Two Courses (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1997), 53.
170 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

countervalue—it is precisely what is against reason and what does not fit in
to a rationally established order of values and goals. This is all quite differ-
ent from Sartre. I will summarize some of the features of Sartre’s scheme
that contrast with the voluntarism described by Pinckaers, and then I will
give some examples from Being and Nothingness.
(A) For Sartre, choices about action are always comprehensible in the
light of what we understand to be good. We can only do what we under-
stand to be worthwhile and valuable. In this sense the “will” (in the lan-
guage of Ockham) is tightly integrated with the “reason” and cannot go
against its conclusions. Motive, act, and end make up an unbreakable com-
plex of reasons, actions, and values that refer to each other and depend
on each other. If someone is capricious or an action gratuitous then that
person, according to Sartre, has not acted freely. There is no such thing
for Sartre as an arbitrary human action, one without a motive or an end—
although there are many things we do accidentally (or incidentally) for
which our freedom is not responsible. This is therefore quite different (to
take another example of voluntarism) from Kierkegaard’s teleological sus-
pension of the ethical, where obedience to God’s particular commands can
take someone outside the sphere of the ethical and into an activity that is
at odds with one’s system of understood moral values.54 Kierkegaard and
Ockham allow the will to move against the recommendations of reason—
creating what could be called a nonethical freedom, or alternatively an ir-
rational ethic. Sartre’s human being has to be ethical. In his scheme we have
to live for values that are comprehensible and make sense of our life.
(B) The freedom that founds an intentional complex does not func-
tion within the reasoning determined by this complex—it is “prior” to it.
This is why freedom cannot go against reason. It is, rather, the foundation
of one line of reasoning. In the moment of choice there are no necessary
goals proposed by a rational assessment of our situation, so freedom is not
moving against any rational recommendations. It is not indifferent to “the”
good that is understood, because in the moment of choice there are no ra-
tionally persuasive values to which it can be indifferent. As we discovered
in chapter 3, the subjective involvement of human beings is what allows
the objective truth about the world to be revealed. There can be no reasons

54. See Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existen-
tialism (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1967), 28–30.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 171

(no motives or ends) unless we have freely chosen to establish a particular

project by acting in a certain way. Sartre wants to defend us from “the illu-
sion which would make of original freedom a positing of motives and mo-
tivations as objects, then a decision from the standpoint of these motives
and motivations.”55 The motives and motivations do not exist before the
commitment of freedom, so they cannot be rejected or accepted.
(C) Much thinking and action does take place within a framework
of reasons provided by an ongoing project. We often weigh up different
means, using a rational scale, to see which will best achieve a preestab-
lished goal. Yet if, having been committed to project A, we then reach a
point of crisis and have to choose between project X and project Y, the ra-
tionality of project A cannot always determine which of the two possible
future projects will be most reasonable. Sometimes one comes to a point
where, as Phyllis Sutton Morris puts it, “what counts as a reason must be
decided upon before one can begin the process of decision making on the
level of particular acts.”56 Both new projects (X and Y) make sense of A,
and the point is that each one makes a different kind of sense of project A
and the reasons contained within it. Each one could justify the decision to
choose it. The decision cannot be made solely within the terms of project
A, nor within some higher or abstract structure of reasoning. The decision
is the living of a certain life (X or Y) within which the earlier life (A) makes
a new kind of sense. We are not simply discovering, through rational in-
vestigation, who we already are. We are deciding who we shall become and
what will define us. This decision creates something completely new that
has never existed before, which is at the same time a rational continuation
of the life up to this point. This original choice is one with the conscious-
ness we have of ourselves.
And as our being is precisely our original choice, the consciousness (of) the
choice is identical with the self-consciousness which we have [la conscience (de)
choix est identique à la conscience que nous avons (de) nous]. One must be con-
scious in order to choose, and one must choose in order to be conscious. Choice
and consciousness are one and the same thing.57

55. BN 462; EN 506/539.

56. Phyllis Sutton Morris, Sartre’s Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 108.
57. BN 462; EN 506/539.
172 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

So there is no voluntaristic, irrational rejection of the goods that have been

significant for the agent, there is instead a prerational or suprarational
choice about future goods that preserves and transforms the rationality
that has sustained the initial project. Once again, freedom does not work
against reason.
Sartre gives a concrete and apparently trivial example of a group of hik-
ers out on a tiring walk.58 After several hours one hiker gives up because he
is tired. His exhaustion is given as a reason for stopping. He judges that his
tiredness is unbearable and gives a decisive value to resting. His compan-
ions, who are equally tired, judge their tiredness to be endurable and even
embrace it as part of the experience of conquering the mountain. The dif-
ferent decisions reflect different attitudes to hiking and to life in general.
Sartre goes on to analyze the total worldview and original project that is
expressed through each choice. In each case we are still within a given com-
plex of motive-action-end. The one who gives up the hike values the com-
fort of the city more than the others, and he has a low appreciation of the
value of overcoming difficulties. These are the things that motivate him to
stop walking. Could he do otherwise? Yes he could. He is not constrained to
stop, and he does not actually collapse against his will through exhaustion.
The real question is this: What price would he pay for making another deci-
sion? To stop walking is to reaffirm his quest for a comfortable, stress-free,
urban existence—this is the “ultimate and initial possible” that drives him,
the value that forms his project.59 Sartre speaks for him in the first person:
I can refuse to stop only by a radical conversion of my being-in-the-world; that
is, by an abrupt metamorphosis of my initial project—i.e., by another choice of
myself and of my ends. Moreover this modification is always possible.60

The “cost” of making a different choice would be abandoning one’s previ-

ous goals and motives and structuring one’s life in a new way. It would be
a new way of being.
Sartre’s description of freedom might still seem to suggest that human
actions are gratuitous, but in fact it is the one explanation that can save the
free act from being gratuitous. If we admit that there are motives for ac-
tions, based on the understanding and values we have, then we are faced

58. See BN 453–55 and 464–65; EN 498–500/530–32 and 508–10/542–44.

59. BN 464; EN 509/542.
60. BN 464; 509/542.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 173

with two other unsatisfactory alternative explanations. (i) Motives are fixed
and determine our actions completely. We cannot act otherwise and so we
are not free. (ii) Free acts are those that go against our motives, that is, they
are irrational and gratuitous. Sartre describes a third way in which we have
a choice because we can allow ourselves to be moved by different motives,
by changing the understanding and values we have, and by becoming a
different person. We do not go against reason, we refound it. We rethink
reason itself. To put it another way: We can act differently because we can
adapt, expand, and transform our rationally appreciated desires. We are
free to do something different because we are free to be someone different,
and in this way the free act is always integrated with our understanding
and our rational goals and our identity. This is far from voluntarism.
It still begs the question, of course, of whether this choice to allow
oneself to be moved by different motives is a fully rational choice. Sartre
would say that this very question misses the point: The decision to let our-
selves be guided by certain motives is the very thing that allows us to be
rational; it is the foundation of rationality. There is no abstract set of rea-
sons lying outside our intentional frame of reference. We can only reason
in a particular way because we have experienced, perhaps only in anticipa-
tion, the inner logic of this choice, and been attracted by this logic. Why
do I choose to do this? Because I want to; because it makes sense; because
it is reasonable. That’s all there is to say. And if someone then asks, “Ah,
but why do you to choose to do this rather than something else?” I still
give the same answer: Because I want to; because it makes sense; because
it is reasonable. I don’t have to say, I choose this because it makes more
sense than the alternatives—since that answer only becomes true once I
have chosen it. They all make sense, that’s why I have to choose. The fact of
choosing then becomes a part of what allows us to make sense of what we
have chosen, not as an additional reason, but as the act that brings to light
the reality of this intentional path.
I know that the other courses of action are also reasonable (in different
ways). Acts are free, and once they are unfolding they make perfect sense
in the light of our motives. So acts are never gratuitous. The gratuitousness
is now moved to a different level, to that of the person, of the being of the
human agent. The reason why this person is this person lies in his or her
being, which is identical with the choice one makes about one’s existence.
To be a human being is to be free to be who one chooses to be (within
174 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

the factual limits of one’s circumstances)—anything else would run against

the phenomenological evidence of anguish. So the gratuity of the act is
avoided in favor of the gratuity (or absoluteness or self-constitution) of the
person. This ongoing fundamental choice of oneself is necessarily uncon-
ditioned, since it is the negation and foundation of conditions.
We know that we can “reverse steam” and abruptly invert this choice.
We are perpetually threatened with the negation of our present choice in
the future.61 But this fragility is part of the absolute, foundational nature of
the choice—it is attendant on the fact that we are free to be ourselves in the
present, and on the fact that we are not free to abandon our freedom by fix-
ing some determinate choice for the duration of the future. Freedom and
a lack of integration go hand in hand. It is as if the perpetual possibility of
“otherness” is interiorized and there is a simultaneous experience of disin-
tegration and reintegration. Anguish, writes Sartre, is “the fear which I have
of being suddenly exorcized, that is, of becoming radically other [de devenir
radicalement autre].”62 Our reality is interrogative and our being is always in
question, “since it is always separated form itself by the nothingness of oth-
erness [puisqu’il est toujours séparé de lui-même par le néant de l’altérité].”63
Sartre is happy to call the choice of oneself “absurd.” The absurdity lies
in the fact that the necessity of choosing oneself is an unavoidable given
for each human being. We have to choose who we are but we are not the
foundation of the being which has to make this choice.
We apprehend our choice—i.e., ourselves—as unjustifiable. This means that we
apprehend our choice as not deriving from any prior reality but rather as being
about to serve as foundation for the ensemble of significations which constitute
reality.64

We could say that for Sartre we establish the form of our existence but
not the fact of our existing. Human beings do not create their whole be-
ing from nothing, and in this sense they share in the unjustifiability and
incomprehensibility of everything: “By this being which is given to it, hu-
man reality participates in the universal contingency of being and thereby
in what we may call absurdity.”65

61. BN 465; EN 509/543. 62. BN 475; EN 520/555.

63. BN 619; EN 667/713. 64. BN 464; EN 509/542.
65. BN 479; EN 524/559.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 175

Temporality, Conversion, and the Unity of Life

Despite all that has been said about the continuing role of motives, a se-
rious misunderstanding is possible here. It might seem that the unjusti-
fiability of the choice creates a structure in which the act has no rational
justification in the past or in the identity of the agent. It might seem that
the continuing possibility of remaking the choice and undermining it will
destroy the coherence and continuity of any life project. Sartre recognizes
that the possibility of a meaningful life is radically undermined if original
choice is thought of as “producing itself from one instant to the next.”66 His
answer is to affirm the importance of temporality. Just as the act founds
the end and the motive, the present founds the future and the past. The
choice in the present is not an arbitrary event that interrupts an already es-
tablished orderly progression from past to future, it is the very thing that
makes the unity of past and future possible. This is a subtle idea that needs
some explanation.
We have to keep returning to the phenomenological roots of this inves-
tigation: anguish, presence to self, the denial of identity, the insufficiency
of the past. If the past simply explained the present and justified a certain
future, there would be no questions to ask about freedom. The problem is
that we have a direct experience of the insufficiency of the past, of its lack
of meaning, and precisely of its lack of an established continuity with our
present and future.
We can return to the reformed gambler of chapter 1. He stands at the
casino door and is torn between two irreconcilable desires: to gamble and
not to gamble.67 He remembers his vow never to gamble again. It is a past
that does not give him direction because of the fact that he can consider
it and that its implications are necessarily ambiguous. “By the very fact
of taking my position in existence as consciousness of being, I make my-
self not to be the past of good resolutions which I am.”68 His past identity
is disintegrating before his eyes. The vow faces him as a dead, free-floating
fact without any orientating relation to his present actions. It could be the
vow of another person—until he makes a choice and acts. The crisis arises
because the vow has no fixed meaning, it doesn’t lead him to anything—

66. BN 465; EN 510/543. 67. BN 32–33; EN 67–68/69–70.

68. BN 33; EN 68/71.
176 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

there is no steady line of continuity. Only when he chooses and acts does
the vow take its place in a temporal succession of meaning. If he walks
away from the casino, the vow becomes the source of that resolution that
keeps him away. If he enters the casino, the vow becomes a pointless mo-
ment of heroism in a life otherwise wholly given to gambling. The action
in the present fixes and orientates the event in the past.
The important point to grasp is that before he acts, when he experi-
ences the anguish of having to choose, the vow has no fixed meaning. It is a
memory without force, an event without significance, and it has no mean-
ingful place in his personal history. This changes when he acts—however
he acts. By giving it meaning (in the present) he gives it a secure place
in his past. So temporality is established by and not broken by the unjus-
tifiable upsurge of the present choice. Consciousness is not a succession
of instantaneous moments isolated from each other—it is the foundation
of temporality. To be conscious is to allow an understanding of oneself to
emerge in a framework of time. Sartre puts this beautifully: To choose our-
selves is “to cause a future to come to make known to us what we are by
conferring a meaning on our past.”69 Our orientation to a future allows us
to unify the self that is seeking this future. We are “self-creating selves,”
as Phyllis Sutton Morris puts it, where the created self (who we are in the
light of our past) is formed by the creating self, which is nothing other
than the conscious bodily agent acting in the present.70
The original choice continually made in the present is in one sense an
unjustifiable foundation for all temporality, just as the act founds the mo-
tive and end. Yet in another sense the choice, no matter how radical and
spontaneous, is always an essential part of a reinterpreted temporal pro-
gression. This is why it is impossible to isolate a “new” choice from the
life it manifests. Freedom always has the two faces of sheer originality and
plodding necessity. A “new” choice, for example, is certainly an integral
part of the newly begun totality—it explains the direction of the future.
It is less obvious, but equally true, that the new choice necessarily deter-
mines itself “in connection with the past which it has to be.”71
Whatever the decision, we have to understand it in terms of our past,
69. BN 465; EN 510/543.
70. Phyllis Sutton Morris, “Self-Creating Selves: Sartre and Foucault,” American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1996).
71. BN 466; EN 511/545.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 177

even if the new decision makes us realize how wrong we were before. Our
new “rightness” is a correction and in some ways a culmination or fulfill-
ment of the “wrongness” that guided us in the past. If we do something
completely unconnected with our past identity, without any reference at
all to what went before, this is not freedom—we call it madness or am-
nesia. The radical, unjustifiable choice has to justify itself and interpret
itself in the perspective of the past. Whether we fight the enemy or flee,
remain in our marriage or leave, eat the chocolate or diet, work for a mul-
tinational corporation or travel the world—in each case we will under-
stand the choice in terms of the past and see our past as building up to it
and explaining it. In each case the immediacy of the present choice, which
seems to shatter all continuity, is actually the very moment that establishes
continuity. Even the many “noncrisis” things that we do without much re-
flection—feeding our children, traveling to work, watching the TV—are
original choices, in the sense that they perpetuate and reestablish for the
present a specific temporal project (that is already under way). We give
them our implicit consent, and there is always an implicit possibility of not
doing them.
If we make a radical change, then the decision to change is what gives
new meaning even to the past choice that is rejected. The new choice is
“on principle, a decision to apprehend as past the choice for which it is
substituted.”72 This is why it is a grave misunderstanding to think that Sar-
tre’s view of original choice implies a series of discontinuous changes and
arbitrary repudiations of one’s past. A “new” choice is not “a global flip-
flop,”73 nor a wild, empty leaping of the will away from one’s established
personality and one’s present reasoning.74 Consciousness takes the past as
an object and “evaluates it and takes its bearings in relation to it.”75 Sartre
later puts this in a succinct phrase: “It is the future which decides whether
the past is living or dead.”76
Every memory is an interpretation and a certification. An event as un-
controversial as a childhood illness depends on a thousand present proj-
ects to sustain it. Sartre’s memory of having whooping cough as a four year
old depends on his commitment to a social order that uses a certain calen-

72. BN 466; EN 511/545.

73. Jopling, “Sartre’s Moral Psychology,” 126.
74. Cf. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 26–40.
75. BN 467; EN 512/546. 76. BN 499; EN 544/580.
178 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

dar, to the trustworthiness of the adults who recounted it, to the medical
science that defines the condition.77 We could object that there is simply a
brute fact lodging in his memory. Sartre would say that we cannot get at
this fact—cannot select it, locate it, describe it, understand it—without the
structures of interpretation provided by our present commitments. This
doesn’t mean that we can always control which memories come to mind
and when they do (although our consent is often more important than we
admit). It does mean that whatever the memory is, it must be understood
in the light of our projects. We could also object that this overarching so-
cial order is not something one can realistically opt out of. A young boy
like Sartre brought up in early twentieth-century France did not have the
option of dating his birth by the Egyptian or Mayan calendar. Sartre would
still say that we are giving assent to the pervasive social order, and align-
ing our personal project with the larger social one, even if there are not
many live alternatives. We may not be responsible for the values of our so-
ciety, but we are complicit in them. It is worth remembering that all soci-
eties have had those who have chosen to reject aspects of the social order
through voluntary exile or rebellion.
Phyllis Sutton Morris suggests that for Sartre remembering is remem-
bering-as. In this respect he agreed with the Freudians in saying that a
principle of selection operates in memory. Yet for Sartre the principle is
one with our present projects, it is not some hidden influence determining
us despite ourselves. His phenomenology of freedom is not divorced from
psychology. Morris writes: “We are not, then, at the mercy of the past, and
we cannot excuse present actions on the basis of inexorable memories of
the past.” Sartre’s discussion of memory “is directed against those psycho-
logical determinists who would claim that memories of the past compel or
coerce present action and that men are therefore not responsible for their
acts.”78 Nevertheless, we have to keep reminding ourselves that the influ-
ence of a past that is given meaning by our project in this way is real, it ex-
ists in the past and not just in the imagination of the one who acts, it is
what the agent discovers.79

77. BN 498; EN 543/579.

78. Morris, Sartre’s Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach, 64, see also 55–64.
79. In BN Sartre is usually concerned with the individual human being, but one can ap-
ply his analysis of time and consciousness to other “subjects”: to groups, institutions, commu-
nities, etc.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 179

So our free acts in the present structure our past and our future and
allow us to interpret them. Sometimes these acts reinforce our previous
interpretations. Sometimes a new way of acting gives rise to a new inter-
pretation—which is still, nevertheless, in continuity with one’s past. “Con-
version” is Sartre’s preferred word to stand for the radical modification of
one’s project that brings about a new continuity. A converted atheist is not
simply a believer, “he is a believer who has denied atheism for himself,
who has turned the project of being an atheist into an aspect of the past in
him [qui a passéifié en lui son projet d’être athée].”80 His previous atheism
is not simply ignored, it becomes a part of his new religious story. His re-
ligious conversion—far from being capricious—makes perfect sense when
set against the atheist background. Sartre is at his most eloquent when he
points to some of the great conversions in literature: Gide’s Philoctetes
casts off his hate, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov decides to give himself up.
These extraordinary and marvellous instants when the prior project collapses
into the past in the light of a new project which rises on its ruins and which as
yet exists only in outline, in which humiliation, anguish, joy, hope are delicately
blended, in which we let go in order to grasp and grasp in order to let go—these
have often appeared to furnish the clearest and most moving image of our free-
dom.81

Sartre himself delighted in experiences of crisis and conversion. After

strenuous resistance he finally supported (if only for the next four years)
the pro-Stalinist Communist Party (the PCF) in the summer of 1952 in the
face of much derision. He was mocked by its enemies and suspected by its
members. Yet for him nothing was more thrilling or enjoyable than these
moments “in which he believed with all the fervency of the convert that
until now he had been totally wrong but now he was totally right.”82
The exhilarating heart of freedom, however, is not necessarily found
in conversion. It is in the free choice of one’s project, and this is found as
much in the free preservation of a project as in its rejection. A lifelong de-
votion to a duty inherited from birth can be an expression of freedom as

80. BN 467; EN 511/545.

81. BN 476; EN 521/555.
82. Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre (London: Weidenfeld & Ni-
colson, 1986), 280.
180 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

long as it is accepted and undertaken as a personal commitment and not

as a necessity that “sincerity” imposes. Sartre’s examples focus on moments
of drama and change, but this should not make us lose sight of his cen-
tral contention that freedom lies in one’s personal commitment to a proj-
ect, whatever it is. Projects that are dutiful, common, or dull have as much
significance in Sartre’s scheme as those that are reckless, extraordinary, or
dazzling—as long as they are freely chosen.
The most beautiful description Sartre gave of the twofold face of free-
dom is in a passage about the graceful body.83 A moment of grace has both
continuity and originality—and these aspects do not in any way contradict
each other. “The graceful act has on the one hand the precision of a finely
tuned machine and on the other hand the perfect unpredictability of the
psychic.”84 It is perfectly understandable if one considers what has elapsed,
it has a kind of aesthetic necessity, yet it remains unpredictable and awaits
an unforeseen illumination from a future goal. The graceful movement of
a hand seems to be both required by the situation, summoned, and to be
the very origin of its being. Grace is an image of the inseparability of ne-
cessity and freedom in human life.

Facticity and the Limits of Freedom

Sartre has used a number of characters to exemplify his theories: the hiker,
the gambler, the oppressed worker, the emperor, the affronted patriot who
is also a dutiful son. All of them have to decide who they will become.
They have to choose to act for an end on the basis of selected motives.
Does this mean that they can choose anything at all? What are the con-
straints of freedom? How can there be any limits if the limits are them-
selves interpreted in the light of one’s acts?
It should be clear from the discussion of objectivity in chapter 3 that for
Sartre factual limits are only discovered within a personal project, yet they
remain just that: factual limits that reveal the objective nature of the world.
We have to obey nature in order to command it, and if we wish to act, then
we have to accept a network of determinism. There is a givenness to every-
thing we encounter, a resistance, a “facticity.” This makes it possible for us,
within a given project, to distinguish truth from falsehood and realistic in-

83. BN 400; EN 440/470.

84. BN 400; EN 440/470.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 181

tentions from fantasies. It also makes it possible for us, within a given proj-
ect, to find objective foundations for that project. Mountain climbing, for
example, makes no sense without mountains, and only when we decide to
climb will we discover if a given obstacle is climbable or not.85
In Being and Nothingness Sartre discusses the various forms of facticity
under five headings: one’s place, past, environment, fellow human being,
and death.86 These are some of the richest sections of the work. The weight
of facticity appears in many forms. Climate, earth, race, class, language,
history, heredity, childhood, habits, and the small and great events of life
all press in and form us.87 One of the most indisputable facts confronting
human beings, mentioned in an earlier section of Being and Nothingness,
is the biological unity of each human organism, our “shocking solidarity
with the foetus.”88
Sartre therefore recognizes that we appear to be made more than to
make ourselves.89 He goes on to argue, however, that the factual limits of
our actions are not limits to existential freedom, they actually make free-
dom possible, since freedom is the way we go beyond all that is to a not-
yet-existing end. “Only the ensemble of real existents can separate us from
this end—in the same way that this end can be conceived only as a state
to-come [état à-venir] of the real existents which separate me from it.”90
Being-for-itself is the negation of these “real existents.” It depends on
them. “There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world.”91
So freedom is nothing without our presence to the facticity of existence.
Given this facticity, we can notice three ways in which the “absoluteness”
of human freedom is qualified.
First, freedom is an essential aspect of conscious human life, but it is
not the whole of human life. There is more to the human being, to human
reality, than being-for-itself. It is actually only one element of an original
synthesis. Human reality is the negation and reconstitution of a particu-
lar being-in-itself, through the presence to self of being-for-itself, in a total
context of one’s being-in-the-world—with an awareness of one’s being-for-
others.92 This is what saves Sartre from a rootless freedom that would have

85. BN 482; EN 527/562. 86. BN 489–553; EN 535–98/570–638.

87. BN 481–82; EN 527/561–62. 88. BN 139; EN 174/185.
89. BN 481–82; EN 527/561–62. 90. BN 483; EN 528/563.
91. BN 483; EN 528/563.
92. There is not space in this book to deal adequately with being-for-others.
182 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

no relationship with an embodied human life. In Sartre’s philosophy it is

not true to say “The human being is freedom.” We should instead say “The
human being is free,” since the human being is not an abstract freedom but
the free reconstitution of a concrete bodily life.
A second sense in which freedom is not absolute stems from the con-
tingency of freedom itself. We did not freely choose to be free. Our free-
dom is a contingent fact about our being, a given that we have to accept.
The absoluteness of freedom does not therefore imply that freedom is its
own foundation, as if we could decide whether to be free. Sartre famously
writes that we are “condemned to be free”—a strangely negative phrase
that simply means that freedom is the starting point for our existence, part
of the facticity that defines our life.93 This language of “condemnation” is
Sartre’s exaggerated way of expressing the very humble thought that we do
not create our existence as such even though we have to create the form
that this existence will take through our project.
A third sense in which freedom is not absolute will require some ex-
planation, since it is so often ignored. The “absoluteness” of freedom has
nothing to do with naïve notions of human omnipotence. Nowhere in Be-
ing and Nothingness does Sartre suggest that human beings, blind to the
constraints of their circumstances, can achieve all that they wish to achieve
through a kind of Promethean will to power. Practical questions about the
effectiveness of human activity are simply not the main concern of this
work. Sartre makes a very clear distinction between the “empirical and
popular” concept of freedom, which is “the ability to obtain the ends cho-
sen,” and the “technical and philosophical” concept of freedom, which is
the “autonomy of choice.”94 We could also call this a distinction between
practical freedom and ontological or existential freedom. If all his readers
had paid attention to this distinction he would have been spared a great
deal of misunderstanding.95 Sartre explains:
“To be free” does not mean “to obtain what one wanted” but rather “by oneself
to determine oneself to want” (in the broad sense of choosing) [“se déterminer

93. BN 485; EN 530/565.

94. BN 483; EN 528/563.
95. For an account of various misunderstandings, see David Detmer, Freedom as a Value:
A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1988), esp. 36–38
and 55–56.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 183
à vouloir (au sens large de choisir) par soi-même”]. In other words success is not
important to freedom.96

We should note that Sartre does not say that practical success is not im-
portant in itself (he cared deeply about practical matters), he says that it is
not important to freedom. In other words, we are still free even if we fail
to achieve our ends. We should also remember that the self-determination
of our wanting is strictly limited by our situation, since “choice” in Sar-
tre’s technical language means undertaking a project and not just dream-
ing about an alternative reality.97 Sartre never implies that human beings
can conjure up any project they like for themselves, irrespective of their
past, their personality, their commitments, their actions. A single sentence
that encapsulates Sartre’s thinking about the contingent limits of freedom
could be the following: “To be free is not to choose the historic world in
which one arises—which would have no meaning—but to choose oneself
in the world whatever this may be.”98 Historic world stands here for that
immensely complex set of facts and circumstances that constitutes one’s
present reality. It all has to be accepted and surpassed, affirmed and de-
nied.99 Sartre gives the example of the prisoner.
We shall not say that a prisoner is always free to get out of prison, which would
be absurd, nor that he is always free to long for release, which would be an irrel-
evant truism, but that he is always free to try to escape (or to get himself liber-
ated); that is, that whatever his condition may be, he can project his escape and
teach himself the value of his project [il peut pro-jeter son évasion et s’apprendre
à lui-même la valeur de son projet] by beginning some action.100

96. BN 483; EN 528/563.

97. See Sartre’s distinction between a wish (un souhait) and a free choice. A wish is a desire
not to be in this situation, a free choice is a decision to transform this situation by seeking an
end. See BN 482–83; EN 527–28/562–63.
98. BN 521; EN 566/604.
99. This suggests that truthfulness (at least to oneself) is a requirement for freedom.
Truthfulness is not a project, it is a precondition for all projects. Sartre could have added that
for this we will need certain intellectual aids: language, discernment, a critical eye, the advice
of others, a cultural respect for truth, etc. We will also need certain moral virtues: honesty, hu-
mility, courage, perseverance, etc. If we are free we will seek to cultivate the intellectual and
moral virtues necessary for leaning the truth about ourselves and our situation and holding to
that truth.
100. BN 485; EN 529/563–64.
184 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

The “choice of oneself ” which Sartre refers to so often is highly nuanced:

I have to choose myself “not in my being but in my manner of being.”101
This is the heart of freedom: the fact that within being, being itself is given a
new orientation through its relationship with a freely created end that does
not exist in being. Human beings determine their manner of being.
If there seems to be a just balance in Sartre’s thought between accepting
the contingent facts of one’s circumstances and freely choosing one’s ends,
we should not think that the raw facts can be appreciated before the ends
are chosen. They are never apprehended outside the interpretation given
by freedom. Facts and circumstances are only understood in the light of
one’s freely chosen goals. This seems to reintroduce the problem of circu-
larity: We choose our goals on the basis of the facts, but the facts are inter-
preted in the light of our goals. Sartre admits that this seems to be a “para-
dox,” but he insists that it represents the reality of the human situation.102
We are always being confronted by facts we have not chosen, yet we only
understand them in the light of our ends, and our ongoing commitment to
new ends makes us reinterpret and surpass these facts.
There is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through free-
dom. Human-reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it
has not created, but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and
through the free choice which human-reality is.103

Freedom and facticity therefore require each other. There is no contradic-

tion between the two. In a later passage he restates the same idea:
Just as the situation is neither objective nor subjective, so it can be considered
neither as the free result of a freedom nor as the ensemble of the constraints to
which I am subject; it stems from the illumination of the constraint by freedom
which gives to it its meaning as constraint.104

One can see why Sartre had such an ambiguous relationship with the
structuralism that became popular in French philosophy. He insisted as
much as anyone on the impossibility of encountering unmediated facts
and on the omnipresent influence of human structures. But his other two
convictions are inseparable from this. First, he is convinced that the objec-

101. BN 548; EN 593/633. 102. BN 489; EN 534/569.

103. BN 489; EN 534/569. 104. BN 551; EN 596/636.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 185

tive reality of the world is revealed through these structures and claims its
rightful meaning within them. Second, he is convinced that the structures
are not static, they are constructed and kept in being only through the pur-
poseful activity of human beings as they go beyond what they encoun-
ter. In other words, Sartre believed in truth and freedom as well as struc-
ture, and far from thinking that these were threatened by the constraints
of structure he believed that all three concepts depended on each other for
their significance. Many years after Being and Nothingness he wrote: “There
is no doubt that structure produces behaviour. But what is wrong with rad-
ical structuralism [.....] is that the other side of the dialectic is passed over
in silence, and History is never shown producing structures.”105
The question of structures relates to the broader question of the re-
lationship between individual freedom and human culture. There is no
doubt that Sartre paid more detailed attention to cultural factors in his
later works, where the concept of the vécu (“lived experience”) becomes
central.106 Influenced by figures such as Freud, Lacan, and Marx, he is
much more aware of the opaque forces of family and history that structure
a human life. “A simple formula would be to say that life taught me la force
des choses—the power of circumstances.”107 Yet Sartre does concern him-
self with the subject of culture in Being and Nothingness. The long section
entitled “Freedom and Facticity: The Situation” is a philosophy of culture
in all but name.108 Sartre analyzes the numerous ways in which the reality
of the world is mediated to us through humanly constructed frameworks.
As I have already suggested in my introduction, the formal relationship
between facticity and freedom remains fundamentally the same in his ear-
lier and his later work, and there is a change of emphasis and tone rather
than a new philosophy. In later years Sartre defines freedom as “the little
movement that makes of a totally conditioned social being a person who
does not return in its entirety what he received from his conditioning.”109

105. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IX (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 86.

106. On the shift in his thinking, see Christina Howells, “Conclusion: Sartre and the De-
construction of the Subject,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 335–43; and Thomas W. Busch, The Power
of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), esp. 41–42 and 95–101.
107. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Itinerary of a Thought,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 33.
108. Part 4, chapter 1, section II. 109. Sartre, Situations IX, 101–2.
186 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

He writes that the project is a “mediation between two moments of ob-

jectivity” (between what forms us and what we form), and he proclaims
his enduring interest in “the perpetually resolved and perpetually renewed
contradiction between the-human-being-as-producer and the-human-
being-as-product, in each individual and at the heart of each multiplicity.”110
None of these statements contradicts the overarching thought of Being and
Nothingness, which proves to be programmatic for all his later works.

The Persistence of Existential Freedom

Perhaps the hardest and most illuminating question to ask is whether free-
dom can ever be taken away from a human being. There are “soft” versions
of this question that highlight the apparent lack of existential freedom ex-
perienced in everyday life. Gregory McCulloch thinks that some of Sar-
tre’s talk about choice is overblown and that he ignores the phenomenon
of drift. We have many broad preferences determined, for example, by our
biological facticity, and even though we can question them they are hard
to change and the alternatives remain stubbornly dead.111 Phyllis Sutton
Morris draws attention to the many ordinary people who seem unable to
decide what they most want, or who are unable to organize their decisions
into a life project, or who are living a number of irreconcilable projects at
the same time. “The perpetually confused and the chronically inadequate
do not appear to be describable as individuals who have made a choice of
fundamental project.”112
Sartre’s account allows for these states. Being and Nothingness is alive to
the reality of drift—it goes by the name of bad faith, or seriousness, or sin-
cerity, and it can be confused with an ongoing commitment to a free proj-
ect. He would use his existential psychoanalysis to show that confusion
and indecision are often deeply engrained ways of approaching the world
that reflect subtle choices about our sense of self.113 At the same time he
recognizes that a weight of facticity limits the full functioning of many
minds, hearts, and bodies. But he would remind us that existential free-

110. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Vol. 1: Théorie des Ensembles Pra-
tiques, Bibliothèque des Idées (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 67–68 and 158.
111. Gregory McCulloch, Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes
(London: Routledge, 1994), 66–69.
112. Morris, Sartre’s Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach, 117.
113. See his description of the inferiority complex at BN 459; EN 504/537.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 187

dom lies in the necessity of taking a view on these limitations and not on
the possibility of overcoming them. Someone confused, broken, seemingly
powerless—if the person is conscious—has to choose how to understand
his or her state and how to respond to it, as much as those who are in the
full possession of their powers.
This brings us to the “hard” version of the question about whether
freedom can be taken away. Sartre seems to suggest that even in situations
of grave oppression human beings are still free. Whatever the “coefficient
of adversity” it is “senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign
has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”114 This is the point
at which, according to Herbert Marcuse, his treatise on human freedom
reaches the point of self-abdication. Marcuse writes:
If philosophy, by virtue of its existential-ontological concepts of man or free-
dom, is capable of demonstrating that the persecuted Jew and the victim of the
executioner are and remain absolutely free and masters of a self-responsible
choice, then these philosophical concepts have declined to the level of a mere
ideology, an ideology which offers itself as a most handy justification for the
persecutors and executioners—themselves an important part of the “réalité hu-
maine”. [.....] The free choice between death and enslavement is neither free-
dom nor choice, because both alternatives destroy the “réalité humaine” which
is supposed to be freedom. [.....] Behind the nihilistic language of Existentialism
lurks the ideology of free competition, free initiative, and equal opportunity.
Everybody can “transcend” his situation, carry out his own project: everybody
has his absolutely free choice.115

Sartre has made numerous distinctions that need to be borne in mind

when considering these questions—distinctions between empirical free-
dom and existential freedom, between obtaining what one wants and de-
ciding what one wants, between choosing the reality of one’s being and
choosing the manner of living this reality. His thoughts about the prisoner
are in one sense a test case for existential freedom.116 Of course those en-
slaved or in prison are not free to wish themselves out of their situation
and create a new reality if there is no material prospect of this ever happen-

114. BN 554; EN 598/639.

115. Herbert Marcuse, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘L’être et le néant,’ ”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948): 322.
116. See above and BN 483–84; EN 529/563–64.
188 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

ing. Sartre recognizes that this is an absurd proposition. But what would it
mean to say that the oppressed have no freedom, no choices to make, no
possibility of interpreting the weight of their situation?
The main argument of Being and Nothingness is phenomenological.
Sartre points to the experience of oppression. He will not admit that this
forms a category of experience outside the intentional structures analyzed
in the early parts of the work. It is a fact of experience that the oppressed,
if they are conscious human beings, have to face their experience and work
out what it means and how to react to it. Being-for-itself has to see beyond
the brute givenness of the circumstances and ask what it means in the light
of a freely chosen end. The oppressed, as much as their oppressors, suffer
from anguish and have to ask: Who am I? What is important to me? What
shall I do?
Many people are indeed so brutalized that they are unable to think and
choose—they lose their “existential” consciousness even though they are
technically “conscious” and still awake. They can be overcome with fear
or pain and respond solely through a kind of animal instinct. They can be
drugged into oblivion. They can lose their “presence to self ” just as we do
when we sleep. Many, tragically, are killed. But if they are aware of their ex-
perience, then they have to interpret it and respond to it—this is an exis-
tential fact that Sartre will not let go of. Whatever their concrete circum-
stances, they have at least some choices to make, some moments when they
realize that an action or an attitude is not determined and is “up to them.”
In the very narrow confines of their historical situation, all human beings
have to decide to some small extent how they will act in the circumstances
they inhabit, how they will form the form of life that has been given to
them. Sartre is not suggesting that people can escape their lives, he simply
believes that all people have some personal responsibility for how their life
is lived. Existential freedom cannot be a product of education or opportu-
nity, it is part of the human condition, however terrible the material condi-
tions in which one lives.
It is also a historical fact that the oppressed have always interpreted
their oppression in different ways, and these interpretations have led to
vastly different responses. However terrible their oppression, some have
fought openly, some have engaged in subterfuge, some have accepted their
lot silently, some have collaborated behind the scenes, some have joined
the ranks of the oppressors. Anyone who has seen a documentary such as
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 189

Le Chagrin et la Pitié, about the Nazi occupation of France, will have been
struck by the variety of responses chosen by free human beings in the face
of a situation of terrible oppression.117 Sartre knew as well as anyone that
violent circumstances can take away the practical freedom of entire peo-
ples, yet he didn’t balk from describing the heightened sense of responsi-
bility each person faces in these circumstances.
There is also a metaphysical or anthropological argument implicit in
Being and Nothingness that Sartre doesn’t quite spell out—one that has po-
litical consequences. If we accept that the oppressed have had their onto-
logical freedom taken away from them, then what is there left to defend
in their lives? There is no project, no freedom, no presence to self, and
there is consequently no recognizable human being to harm, no right to
be defended, no dignity to be preserved. The reason we recoil at injustice
and oppression, even when someone seems to have had the very human-
ity crushed out of him, is because we believe there is still a trace of human-
ity present, a life to be lived. Sartre expressed this in a later essay when he
took issue with a Marxist conception of political liberation that assumes
that structural changes can take away (and restore) the inherent freedom
of human consciousness.
But, say the Marxists, if you teach man that he is free, you betray him; for he no
longer needs to become free; can you conceive of a man free from birth who de-
mands to be liberated? To this I reply that if man is not originally free, but de-
termined once and for all, we cannot even conceive what his liberation might
be.118

David Detmer brings this argument together in a very clear way.

Thus, the slave, the unemployed worker, and the prisoner are free in one sense
of the word, that designated by such expressions as “freedom of choice” and
“ontological freedom,” but relatively unfree in another sense, that designated by
“freedom of obtaining” and “practical freedom.” Moreover, according to Sartre,
it is precisely because the slave, the unemployed worker, and the prisoner are
free in the first sense, that it is possible to (1) describe them as being free in the

117. Le Chagrin et la Pitié [documentary film], written by André Harris and Marcel Oph-
üls, directed by Marcel Ophüls (1969).
118. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays
(New York: Collier, 1962), 244.
190 = h u m a n f r e e d o m
second sense, (2) condemn those who render them unfree in this sense, (3) en-
courage them to become free in this sense, and (4) help them to do so.119

Without the persistent ontological freedom there is simply no one to liber-

ate. If there is no one to liberate, then those who are working for the libera-
tion of the oppressed must have some notion that they are creating the free
humanity of the oppressed through their work of liberation. For phenom-
enological reasons alone Sartre would have found absurd this idea that we
can create some new pocket of human freedom by transforming political
structures. There must be some kernel of freedom in those who are being
liberated, otherwise there will be nothing to liberate.
In all these debates the central argument is the same phenomenological
one that Sartre has pursued throughout Being and Nothingness. Human be-
ings are not just the totality of all that they are, of all that they have become,
they are also a presence to all this. They have to go beyond it, make sense
of it, relate it to a future that is not, and transform it through action. At
this level, there is no difference between oppressor and oppressed, rich and
poor, the famous and the forgotten. All human beings, whatever their na-
ture or circumstances, have to make a life out of what they have been given.
If our practical options are extremely narrow in relation to those of other
human beings we are still existentially responsible for the self we aim to be-
come. This may seem to be a callous view that ignores the huge constraints
imposed upon those, for example, who are poor or oppressed. In reality, it
is the only way of defending the dignity as persons of those who are poor or
oppressed. They are still responsible for themselves and their choices, and
this is why we can honor the choices they make now and wish that they had
greater practical and political scope for choosing in the future.
In itself Sartre’s philosophy is actually a defense of the human against
all dehumanizing forces. He accepts without flinching the total situated-
ness of the self, the comprehensiveness of one’s historical conditioning, the
relativity of all understanding, yet by insisting on our presence to this to-
tality he allows us to transcend it and transform it. Ontological freedom
becomes an argument against passivity, despair, and the reification of the
self. It provides a counterweight to structuralist philosophies that seek to
undermine the possibility of subjectivity or agency. In this sense, Sartre
was a humanist.
119. Detmer, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre, 63.
 f r e e d o m i n s a r t r e = 191

At least some of Sartre’s contemporaries understood correctly the po-

litical implications of existentialism. Ray Davison, reporting the views of
Pierre Verstraeten at a colloquium in 1993, has noted how much Being and
Nothingness was wedded to the historical moment. France was weighed
down with a growing feeling of culpability about the Vichy regime, an op-
pressive sense of historical destiny or fate. With Sartre the opposite was
true:
“Contingence” and “surgissement perpétuel” were notions capable of fragment-
ing the structures of historical confinement and releasing the self from reifica-
tion and passivity. In this sense, Sartre was a philosopher of liberation and a
force of progress right from the original formulation of the ontology.120

To claim that the prisoner is as free as the persecutor is not a justification

for oppression but an appeal to prisoner and persecutor alike: things do
not have to be this way, the prisoner is more than his sufferings, the perse-
cutor is more than his oppressive power. Yet the “more than” is something
that needs to be freely chosen because it cannot be found in the constraints
of the present situation.
Human beings are free because they have to live beyond the present.
We act for a freely chosen end. The choice that we make gives meaning to
everything we experience and constitutes our very being.

120. Ray Davison, “Sartre Resartus: The Circuit of ‘Ipséité’ from London to Clermont Fer-
rand. ‘L’être et le néant’ at 50,” Journal of European Studies 24 (1994): 154.
 Chapter 6

F r e e d o m , C h oic e , a n d t h e
I n d e t e r m i n at io n of R e a s o n
i n Aqu i nas

Desire for the End

Sartre and Aquinas agree that human actions are character-
ized by their end. According to Sartre, there is an insufficiency
about everything we find, and we have to go beyond it and in-
terpret it in the light of a particular chosen future. This future
allows us to make sense of the past and the present, but it can
in no way be derived from the facts of the past and the pres-
ent. Ends cannot be discovered in the world or in ourselves.
We are indeed formed by many factors (our human nature,
our individual psychology, our circumstances, etc.), but these
do not force us to dedicate our lives to the pursuit of any sin-
gle particular goal. This is what Sartre means when he writes
that we cannot receive our ends “either from outside or from a
so-called inner ‘nature.’ ”1 The heart of Sartre’s existential free-
dom lies in the fact that we have to choose a goal and orientate
our life to this goal through action. We are free because we can
choose our ends, and in so doing we determine for ourselves
who we are, where our life is going, and what actions we un-
dertake in the world.
For Aquinas, it would seem, things are much tidier, human

1. BN 443; EN 488/519.

192
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 193

nature is more solidly established, choices are more rational, and ends are
more accessible. In his view, all human beings seek a common goal, which
is determined by their nature. He calls this goal the finis ultimus (“the last
end”) or beatitudo (“happiness”). We are free to choose how we reach this
goal, and we have many short-term goals that allow us to achieve it, but we
have no say in the nature of the final end itself.
Unlike Sartre, therefore, it may seem that Aquinas has a very restricted
view of freedom. Our deepest desire is imposed upon us, our ultimate goal
is determined for us, and freedom extends only to “technical” questions
about which “means” we can employ to get there. It’s as if we are ordered
to visit London and given the choice of whether we take the train or the
bus, or forced into a marriage and invited to select which color wallpaper
will go in the dining room. This seems a far cry from Sartre’s liberté, which
is a completely undetermined decision to form a unique personal iden-
tity by pursuing a freely chosen set of purposes. For Sartre we are artists
and visionaries—responsible for ourselves and for our world. For Aqui-
nas, it seems, we are bureaucrats and managers—responsible for fulfilling
the tasks we have been given, perhaps with some originality or aplomb, but
without much room for maneuver.
In reality, however, the scope Aquinas gives to human freedom is al-
most limitless, and is certainly as wide as Sartre’s. This is because the final
end we seek is the good in general, without any further specification; it is
happiness in principle, without any further conditions. “Under the good in
general are included many particular goods, to none of which is the will
determined.”2 We don’t just choose the means to an already established
end, we also choose the particular form that this end takes for us. We can-
not seek good or happiness in general without making a particular choice
to seek a particular type of good. In this sense the concrete goal that we
seek, the good that embodies our perfect happiness, is completely up to us.
Aquinas, like Sartre, believes that the constitution of practical goals always
depends on human freedom.
The first point to make in this chapter is about the scope of human
choice. Despite what is often assumed, Aquinas believes that we have to
choose all of our ends—except the final one. It’s easy to miss this and over-
emphasize other aspects of Aquinas’s thought. He writes so clearly about

2. ST I-II.10:1ad3.
194 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

the necessity of seeking the final end, and about the instinctive needs and
desires of our human nature, that one could get the impression that the
scope he gives to human choice is minimal. Yet he also states that within
the circumstances of our life we are completely free to determine which
particular goods we seek and which particular form our final end will take.
We freely determine, therefore, who we are, since our identity depends on
what we seek to become through seeking our end.
Having established the scope of human choice, the main argument of
this chapter then concerns the act itself of human choosing. Aquinas says
that choices are made by the will and reason working together. The will ac-
cepts and affirms one possible line of reasoning. This is because in practical
matters the reason is often undetermined since it arrives at many simulta-
neous conclusions. All these conclusions derive from the objective circum-
stances of the world; each one would give rise to a different rationally jus-
tified course of action; yet only one can be acted upon, and sometimes the
reason cannot decide between them. We have to decide to follow one con-
clusion by actively accepting the reasonableness of one single course of ac-
tion with our will. This is why a choice is always rational and personally
willed—which is what makes it free. Human beings seek (through the will)
a good (understood by intellect and reason)—the two elements of choice
are inseparable, yet they are also distinct. In this way we freely constitute
our own identity since we are the concrete seeking of one way of life.
It is vital to keep in mind the meaning of the technical vocabulary used
throughout this chapter, as it was explained in chapter 2, so that the full
significance of Aquinas’s vision of the human being becomes clear. When
he writes about “intellect” and “reason,” he is referring to our openness as
human beings to other things. Understanding makes us present to other
things and one with them. Through understanding we go beyond ourselves
and our interests and share in the reality of other things. We are trans-
formed by them and in some sense we take on their identity. We are inter-
nally displaced so that we have a center outside ourselves. When Aquinas
writes about “will” he is referring to our ability to go beyond ourselves in
a further way. Whenever we act we are seeking to attain a good thing or
to bring about a good situation. This means that we recognize an insuffi-
ciency about the present state of things and want to transform our situa-
tion into something that it is not. The good situation we want to produce
is precisely something that does not yet exist and that could exist. Even in
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 195

the most insignificant willed action we therefore re-create the world and
take it beyond what it is. At the same time, to seek a good thing is to seek
our own good through the achievement of that good thing. We recognize
that our own being is not complete, not sufficient, and we seek a perfection
for ourselves that we do not yet have. This means that we are transforming
ourselves into what we are not and creating a new identity through our ac-
tivity. So there are various levels of identification, transformation, and re-
creation associated with the philosophical vocabulary of Aquinas.
Now, in this chapter, we will see how all the goods that human beings
seek (apart from the final one) are freely chosen. This means that at ev-
ery level the transformation and re-creation of our identity is completely
up to us. We freely determine what we are (through understanding), what
will become of the world (through actively seeking the good), and who we
are becoming (through actively seeking our own perfection in this good).
These are the radical conclusions Aquinas comes to, and they are easily
masked by the language. Throughout this chapter it will help to bear in
mind these large ideas which form the background to many apparently
simple words: intellect, reason, will, etc.
A final introductory note about language. As has been mentioned in
the historical introduction, contemporary English-speaking philosophy
tends to discuss questions of human freedom and action under the head-
ing “freedom of the will.” Aquinas inherits a tradition that refers to simi-
lar issues under the heading liberum arbitrium, which is preserved in the
contemporary French le libre arbitre.3 The Latin does not contain the word
“will,” voluntas. It was a matter of debate whether the will was free, or the
reason, or some other faculty, or none at all.4 For these reasons it seems
prejudicial to the debate to continue using the traditional translation of
“free will” for liberum arbitrium. Various alternatives have been suggested
and used: “free choice,” “free judgment,” “free decision.”5 I have chosen

3. The term goes back to classical literature and legal formulations where it indicates the
“power to decide” or “freedom of action.” See Daniel Westberg, Right Practical Reason: Aristo-
tle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 81–82; and Charles H.
Kahn, “Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine,” in The Question of “Eclecticism”:
Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, ed. John M. Dillon and A. A. Long (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1988), 250.
4. See J. B. Korolec, “Free Will and Free Choice,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medi-
eval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1982), 630–34.
5. See Westberg, Korolec, and also Timothy Suttor in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theo-
196 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

to use the single word “freedom” to stand for the Latin phrase.6 This is
not just to create a convenient parallel with Sartre’s language. Liberum ar-
bitrium is often used by Aquinas as a synonym for libertas (see, e.g., ST
I.83:1ad3). “Freedom” is an English term that can stand for both, and us-
ing it helps us to see that Aquinas is interested in a range of philosophical
concerns that go beyond what might be suggested by a translation such as
“free judgment.” Like the Latin phrase, it leaves open the question of how
the human being is free and where that freedom lies; it emphasizes neither
an intellectual nor a volitional interpretation; and it indicates the subject of
the argument and not its conclusion. I hope this will facilitate the develop-
ment of ideas in this chapter.7

The Indetermination of Particular Goods

The purpose of this section and the following one (about “goods” and
“ends”) is to show that, apart from the formal idea of the final end, Aqui-
nas does not believe them to be predetermined. We have to choose which
particular goods we will seek and which end will perfect us. I will allude to
a number of texts, without going into too much detail, in order to present
a broad picture of Aquinas’s position, and prove that for him our goals and
actions are not determined by our nature. Once this is clear, we can look in
more detail in the following sections at the nature of freedom as it is mani-
fested in the act of choice.
We should recognize at the very start that there are many ways in
which human life is determined. We are contingent, bodily creatures with
a certain nature who live in particular environments. It is worth alluding
to some of the passages where Aquinas describes the extent to which hu-
man life is determined.
We have many instinctive desires that are part of our sensitive appetite
(appetitus sensitivus).8 We thus instinctively want to seek what is suitable

logiae, ed. Thomas Gilby, 60 vols. (London: Blackfriars: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963ff), vol. 11,
237, footnote a.
6. See, e.g., Timothy McDermott’s usage in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Con-
cise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (London: Methuen, 1989), 128–29.
7. This does not rule out the fact that there are other senses of freedom for Aquinas that lie
outside the range of meanings included in liberum arbitrium and libertas, such as the free will
(libera voluntas) that inclines us to our final end, even though it excludes any choice and in-
volves a kind of natural necessity. Cf. DV 24:1ad20.
8. ST I.81:2.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 197

to our human nature and to flee what is hurtful to it—this is our concupi-
scible appetite (appetitus concupiscibilis). We also want to defend ourselves
against things that thwart these aims—this is our irascible appetite (appeti-
tus irascibilis). We are bodily creatures, and our bodiliness takes a particu-
lar form that we have not chosen and that is constantly influenced by other
bodily influences outside our control.9 This bodiliness gives each of us a
certain inherent temperament (complexio) or disposition (dispositio) that
colors the way we see things and inclines us toward certain goals.10 We
also have various acquired habits and passions that incline us to one thing
or another. And whether we like it or not, as Aristotle has pointed out,
hearts beat and genitals stir—as if they were independent creatures with
their own principle of life guiding them.11
Human beings are enmeshed in a great web of forces and causes that
determine everything from the global environment to the quirks of our in-
dividual physiologies. These forces are represented in medieval cosmology
by the movement of the heavenly bodies, motus coelestis corporis.12 This
cosmology allows thinkers like Aquinas to propose a sophisticated and
contemporary-sounding view of our ecological situatedness. These diverse
influences stir us in numerous ways. Aquinas gives the simplest example:
“When it gets cold, we begin to wish to make fire.”13 He even allows for
what we would now call a kind of genetic determinism when he describes
the conception of a child through the union of “the semen and the matter
of the one conceived.”14 This genetic mixing is part of what ensures that
the soul “is in some sense made prone to choose something inasmuch as
the choice of the rational soul is inclined by the passions.”15
We are determined furthermore by the paucity of practical options
available to us at any moment.16 However radical the notion of “choice”
seems, it can only be about possible things—things that can realistically
be achieved through our actions. And even the actions we undertake with
some realistic hope of success may be frustrated from the very beginning.17
We may wish various things, but as soon as we try to command one of our

9. ST I.83:1ad5. 10. DM 6c [468–82].

11. ST I-II.17:9ad2–ad3; cf. Aristotle, De Motu Animalium, trans. Martha Craven Nuss-
baum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 11, 703b5.
12. ST I-II.9:5ad2. 13. ST I-II.9:5ad2.
14. DV 24:1ad19. 15. DV 24:1ad19.
16. ST I-II.13:5c. 17. ST I-II.6:4c.
198 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

powers to act, “the will can suffer violence, as regards the commanded acts
of the will, insofar as violence can prevent the exterior members from ex-
ecuting the will’s command.”18
All of these influences contribute to our “facticity” for Aquinas; we are
always already “in situation.” These Sartrean phrases are entirely appropri-
ate here—they emphasize the extent to which we are made in Aquinas’s
philosophy. We seem so unfree. Numerous influences press upon us from
without and from within, and human life seems thoroughly determined by
forces over which we have no control.
There is another way, however, in which we have a great deal of control
over our lives. Aquinas does not just describe our human nature, he goes
on to explain how this nature is under reason. We have to respond to our
determined nature and decide what we will make of ourselves. We have to
respond to our determined situation and decide what we will make of it.
The irascible and concupiscible appetites are subject to reason and will.19
The instinctive assessment we make of what is best, an assessment that all
animals are able to make through their estimative power (vis aestimativa),
is itself “naturally guided and moved according to universal reason” as it
“directs the sensitive appetite.”20 So we are not just driven by our instincts,
we also direct them according to our deepest understanding of what is true
and what is good. This kind of directing, as we shall see as this chapter de-
velops, depends on the freedom of the individual agent.
The rational appetite is completely undetermined as regards the con-
crete goods that it seeks.21 This is the disconcerting heart of Aquinas’s ac-
count of the will. We freely choose which goods will perfect our life and
give it purpose. We are obliged to find our perfection in something (which
is what it means to seek the universal good), yet there is no necessity for us
to find our perfection in anything in particular.22 Aquinas is unambiguous
about this. In a question about the will in the Summa he writes: “As the ca-
pacity of the will regards the universal and perfect good, its whole capacity

18. ST I-II.6:4c. 19. ST I.81:3c.

20. ST I.81:3c.
21. John Bowlin gives a particularly fine account of the “contingency of the human good”
in Aquinas in chapter 2 of his Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999), esp. 56–66.
22. Not even in God. See ST I.82:2c and Ignatius Theodore Eschmann, The Ethics of Saint
Thomas Aquinas: Two Courses (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997), 53.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 199

is not subjected to any particular good [non subiicitur eius possibilitas tota
alicui particulari bono].”23 When discussing the manner in which we will
in Part I-II he states: “Under good in general are included many particu-
lar goods, to none of which is the will determined [ad quorum nullum vol-
untas determinatur].”24 This is despite the fact that in the body of the same
article he argues that various particular goods are naturally wanted by the
will insofar as they “belong to the willer according to one’s nature” and
“relate to [one’s] natural well-being [respiciunt consistentiam naturalem].”25
The fact that there is a kind of spontaneous desire for what is naturally
beneficial does not mean that the will actively seeks these objects with any
necessity.26 There is not a single particular good to which the whole hu-
man being is naturally, necessarily directed with some kind of integrated
wanting. So although it seems that there are many natural human ends, in
fact there is no natural end for the person. It is not enough for us to want
a good, we have to choose to make that good a part of the universal good
to which we are directing ourselves—it has to become an embodiment of
our deepest desire.
Sometimes, for example in DV 22:5c, Aquinas suggests that human
beings necessarily will some goods, such as life or knowledge, because they
have a necessary connection with our final end. Yet in a parallel question in
Part I of the Summa, which is composed later than De veritate, he is much
more cautious. He still believes that some goods have a necessary connection
with happiness and with our adherence to God, in whom alone true happi-
ness consists. But he recognizes that we can be ignorant of these connec-
tions, and for this reason there are no goods at all that human beings have

23. ST I.82:2ad2. 24. ST I-II.10:1ad3.

25. ST I-II.10:1c. Cf. ST I-II.94:2c (“Does natural law contain many precepts or only one?”)
where Aquinas says that reason naturally apprehends as good those things to which we have a
natural inclination.
26. In the Summa Aquinas grants to the will a natural desire for particular goods, for those
things that belong to the willer as befits his or her nature (ST I-II.10:1); but a natural desire
should not be confused with a necessary desire, and the movement of the will is not itself nec-
essary (ST I-II.10:2). Cf. DM 6c, where Aquinas acknowledges that certain goods are naturally
desired by all human beings (such as existence, life, and knowledge), and states that “the will
prefers [them] from natural necessity [ex necessitate naturali voluntas preeliget illud]” [468–72,
at 470–71]; but in the same section he argues that all goods (apart from happiness) can be con-
sidered in such a way that they will seem less attractive than some alternative goods [441–62].
Cf. David M. Gallagher, “The Will and Its Acts (Ia IIae, Qq. 6–17),” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed.
Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 77–78.
200 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

to will. “Yet until through the certitude of the Divine Vision the necessity
of such connection be shown, the will does not adhere to God of necessity,
nor to those things which are of God [Sed tamen antequam per certidudinem
divinae visionis necessitas huiusmodi connexionis demonstretur, voluntas non
ex necessitate Deo inhaeret, nec his quae Dei sunt].”27 The parallel between the
two passages is not exact, but there is certainly a refusal to allow that in this
present life there are any particular goods that are necessarily willed.
The extraordinary thing about human beings is not that we are unin-
fluenced by our nature or our environment, but that we have to determine
for ourselves how to respond to the sum total of these influences. However
many things form us, we are still capable of asking “What is happening?
What do I want? What shall I do?” It is true that the sensitive appetite con-
tinually influences us: We naturally want to eat, to talk, to discover things,
to be warm, to play, to have families, etc. These things are human goods, and
we often seek them without much reflection, like a moth seeking light or a
lion chasing a gazelle. Yet we have an additional ability to question these in-
stinctive goods and to make our own priorities among them. This process
presupposes an extraordinary ability not to identify with our natural desires
and not to identify with the “person” who seeks these goods. At one and the
same time we recognize (i) that we are this person who does want these
things, and (ii) that we could be a “different” person who would want other
things. If we question one of our present goods (this meal, this job, this hol-
iday, this family), we are necessarily questioning the person who is seeking
these goods—since a good is precisely something desired for the sake of the
perfection of the one who seeks it. To question the good is to question one-
self. This is the deepest significance of the rational appetite.
Animals, of course, have priorities. One desire may override another.
A bird, for example, might refrain from swooping down on the crops if
it knows that the farmer has a gun, in which case self-preservation takes
priority over being fed. Yet the peculiar thing about human beings (and
other creatures with rational appetite) is that we decide how the priorities
are set, we decide for ourselves what is most important.28 We can find our
perfection in different ways in different goods, and the good we eventually

27. ST I.82:2c.
28. See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 90–
95, on the difficulty of prioritizing natural goods. For an excellent discussion of the relation-
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 201

seek is up to us. Animals have to work out how to get the goods they al-
ready seek and so how to perfect the creatures they already are; human be-
ings have to work out which goods to seek and in that way work out which
persons we will allow ourselves to be.29 This is what it is for human nature
to be under reason.

The Indetermination of Ends

Our ability to choose which goods we seek is inseparable from our abil-
ity to choose our end. There are some passages in the works of Aquinas
where he flatly denies that ends can be chosen, and taken out of context
they might convince some readers that the emphasis I put on choice in this
present chapter is misplaced. In ST I-II.13:3, for example, Aquinas writes
that “the end, as such, is not a matter of choice” because it is the principle,
the starting point, of any action, which gives the action meaning.30 Yet in
the same article he qualifies this statement by saying that an end in one ac-
tivity may be achieved for the purpose of achieving something else (“may
be ordered to something as to an end”).31 In this way any end, apart from
our final end, can be a matter of choice, because we may decide that it is
not a suitable means to a further end. It should be borne in mind through-
out this section that whenever we choose between ends we are choosing
between means to a further end.
In a passage from De veritate Aquinas meets head on the possibility
that our ends and therefore our desires are determined by the stable iden-
tity we have received at birth and through the forces of circumstance.32
The objection he meets runs like this, and it could stand as an eloquent ex-
ample of a contemporary argument for determinism:
According to the Philosopher in Ethics 3, “the way we see the end depends on
what we are like [qualis unusquisque est, talis finis videtur ei].” But it is not in
our power to be like this or like that [non est in potestate nostra quod sumus tales

ship between particular goods and the final end of the person, see R. Mary Hayden, “Natural
Inclinations and Moral Absolutes: A Mediated Correspondence for Aquinas,” Proceedings of
the American Catholic Philosophical Association 64 (1990).
29. In this sense, for Aquinas as for Sartre, existence precedes essence, since the identity
we are coming to have (our “essence”) depends on the free response we make (our “existence”)
to what has determined us.
30. ST I-II.13:3c. 31. ST I-II.13:3c.
32. DV 24:1ad19.
202 = h u m a n f r e e d o m
vel tales], since what one is like is given at birth and it depends, as some main-
tain, upon the arrangement of the stars. It is therefore not in our power to ap-
prove this or that end.33

Aquinas’s answer is a blunt restatement of our absolute freedom to choose

particular ends, despite the facticity which makes us who we are:
Neither from the heavenly bodies nor from anything else do human beings ac-
quire from birth immediately in the intellective soul any disposition by which
they are inclined with necessity to choose any end; except that there is in them
from their very own nature a necessary appetite for their last end, happiness.
But this does not prevent freedom, since different ways to attain that end re-
main open to choice [cum diversae viae remaneant eligibiles ad consecutionem
illius finis]. The reason for this is that the heavenly bodies do not have any im-
mediate influence upon the rational soul.34

So no matter how extensive the network of intangible forces that conspire

to shape us (“the heavenly bodies”), they do not touch our rational soul.
In other words, the many causes that determine who we are do not in any
way take away our ability to reason and will. Our being, our identity, can
be determined, but our understanding of that identity (our intellect), our
ability to reinterpret that identity (our reason), and our desire to transform
that identity (our will) can in no way be determined.
Aquinas touches more fully on the indeterminateness of the human
end at the beginning of Part I-II of the Summa. He writes about the last
end of human life, which is beatitudo, “beatitude” or “happiness.”
We can speak of the last end in two ways: first, considering only the idea of last
end [secundum rationem ultimi finis]; secondly, considering the thing in which
the idea of last end is found [secundum id in quo finis ultimi ratio invenitur]. So,
then, as to the aspect of last end, all agree in desiring the last end: since all de-
sire the fulfilment of their perfection, which is the idea of the last end consists,
as stated above [see 1:5]. But as to the thing in which this aspect is realized, all
human beings are not agreed about the last end: since some desire riches as
their consummate good; some, pleasure; others, something else.35

33. DV 24:1obj19. Citing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 3:5, 1114b1. For an English version,
see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985), 69.
34. DV 24:1ad19.
35. ST I-II.1:7c. Thomas Gilby’s translation distinguishes between what happiness means
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 203

On the one hand, the idea of happiness is something all human beings
seek, since we all want to be fulfilled. Aquinas expresses the same point in
a later question: “To desire happiness is nothing else than to desire that
one’s will be satisfied, and this everyone desires” (ST I-II.5:8c).36 It is essen-
tial to note that in Aquinas’s view this is the only thing that we necessarily
seek by nature. On the other hand, human beings are not all agreed about
“the thing in which the idea of the last end is found [id in quo finis ultimi
ratio invenitur],” about “where” the last end is found. Just as we seek our
good in different ways, in different particular goods, so we do not all agree
about which particular thing will perfect us. There is a radical indetermi-
nation about human desire.37
So the fact that we are all necessarily seeking happiness does not deter-
mine for us what thing we actually seek, what the last end is for us. Happi-
ness can take many different forms. In this first question of ST I-II Aqui-
nas is not judging the respective worth of various possible final ends. He
doesn’t say “some people desire riches as their final end (but they are wrong
.....)” or “some desire pleasure (yet this is only part of the story .....)”—these
issues follow in question 2. Here in ST I-II.1 Aquinas is writing about the
nature of human action and its orientation to an end. Aquinas believes that
those who desire riches or pleasure as their consummate good are seek-
ing to be perfected through these goods. The purpose and direction of our
whole life is determined by the end we seek—whatever that may be.38 In
the sed contra to ST I-II.1:5 he writes, “That in which human beings rest as
in their last end, is master of their affections, since they take from that the
rule of their whole life,” and he applies this to gluttons who make the satis-
faction of their belly the dominating end of their whole existence.39 Once
again, Aquinas is not at this stage making moral judgments about human
choices, he is simply noting that we can seek different ends and choose to

and that in which it is realized, and he comments that this is the difference between “the idea
of happiness and the happy-making thing; approximately happiness in the abstract and in the
concrete.” See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 16, footnote b, 27.
36. ST I-II.5:8c.
37. It could be instructive to translate finis ultimus as “a last end” rather than “the last end.”
The indefinite article would remind us that in seeking these particular things we are seeking an
end, our end, and not “that end” which everyone else has.
38. This does not mean that all particular ends are equivalent nor that all human beings
are able to find happiness in the ends they seek. See ST I-II.5:8.
39. ST I-II.1:5 sed c.
204 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

find fulfillment in different places. Aquinas is explicit in De veritate that

different ways are legitimate and possible: “There are many ways of reach-
ing the last end, and for different people different ways prove suitable”40;
and he writes in De malo 6: “we can attain happiness in many ways.”41 Da-
vid Gallagher summarizes Aquinas’s position well:
It is important to emphasize here that the object of the will’s natural inclination
is not some specific good but a general formality, since this fact provides the ul-
timate basis for the will’s freedom. [.....] Because the will tends toward beatitude
in general or toward the perfect good in general, it remains free with respect to
any specific form of beatitude or good. Each person must choose what specific
good will be, for him, his ultimate end.42

A sentence from ST I-II.1:7ad2 expresses this well: “Different ways of devot-

ing oneself to living [diversa studia vivendi] arise from the various things
in which the idea of complete good is sought.”43 In other words, there is
no universal meaning to human life—apart from the search for happiness.
The only common meaning to each human life is the need to have a mean-
ing (a final end secundum ratione ultimi finis): where that meaning will be
found (id in quo finis ultimi ratio invenitur) is up to each individual. In a
question concerning sin later in Part I-II Aquinas makes it explicit that
the decision we make about our final end is a decision about our self and
our identity. Our first decision about our last end takes place in childhood
when the child begins to reason and “to deliberate about itself ” (deliberare
de seipso).44 Jacques Maritain draws attention to this article and comments
that “each time that a man takes himself in hand in order to deliberate over
his ultimate end and to choose his destiny, he recovers in this act some-
thing of the absolute beginnings of his childhood.”45
Our decisions about goods and ends, therefore, are fundamental. Many
aspects of human life are determined by nature and circumstances, yet we
are still responsible for choosing which particular goods we will seek, and
which object our last end will be found in. We are responsible, ultimately,

40. DV 22:6c. 41. DM 6ad9.

42. Gallagher, “The Will and Its Acts (Ia Iiae, Qq. 6–17),” 74.
43. ST I-II.1:7ad2. 44. ST I-II.89:6c.
45. Jacques Maritain, “The Thomist Idea of Freedom,” in Scholasticism and Politics (Lon-
don: Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1945), 99. See also David M. Gallagher, “Desire for
Beatitude and Love for Friendship in Thomas Aquinas,” Mediaeval Studies 58 (1996): 6.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 205

for ourselves. Aquinas believes that we are sources and centers of our ac-
tivity. Our life is our own and that is why we are held responsible for it.
When searching for the explanations and causes behind human behavior
there is nowhere further back to go than the existence of the human being
in question. However many external and internal factors influence the ac-
tion, it is impossible to leave out this aspect of personal commitment that
gives a center to the action and makes it human. Human actions ultimately
refer to and derive from the integrity of this individual human being. We
can now investigate the nature of this freedom that allows human beings
to make decisions about goods and ends.

Freedom, Choice, and Preference

There are many passages in the Summa concerned with freedom and
choice (in relation to God, to angels, and to human beings), and we will
look into some of them in this section. It would take a great deal of space
just to outline Aquinas’s well-known analysis of the structure of the human
act in ST I-II.8–17.46 In this section I will introduce the concept of free-
dom. In the rest of the chapter I will focus on its heart, which lies in the
self-movement of the will toward one way of reasoning from among many
possible ways.
Freedom is not, for Aquinas, a third power that underlies or comple-
ments the work of intellect and will, it is the unified functioning of these
two powers. Freedom is simply the working of intellect and will. We are
free because we understand and desire. It will help to begin looking at one
of the more systematic accounts. In question 83 of Part I Aquinas asks spe-
cifically about the nature of human freedom. He takes it for granted that
human beings are free, appealing—as we might now say—to the witness
of sociologists, lawyers, psychologists, and parents (“otherwise counsels,
exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would
be in vain”).47 Then, by explaining how we are free, he also explains what

46. Good pieces that comment on these questions include Gallagher, “The Will and Its
Acts (Ia Iiae, Qq. 6–17)”; Alan Donagan, “Thomas Aquinas on Human Action,” in The Cam-
bridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan
Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Westberg, Right Practical Reason: Ar-
istotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas; and John Finnis, “Object and Intention in Moral Judg-
ments According to Aquinas,” The Thomist 55 (1991).
47. ST I.83:1c.
206 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

freedom is. It is the fact that the human being, unlike other animals, “acts
from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various
things [potens in diversa ferri].”48 Freedom is thus our ability to seek dif-
ferent things because we can think about things in different ways. Actions
are concerned with contingent, concrete matters, and “in such matters the
judgment of reason may follow opposite courses [ad diversa se habet], and
is not determinate to one. And forasmuch as human beings are rational is
it necessary that they be free.”49
Aquinas takes up the definition of “what is free” (liberum) from Aris-
totle’s Metaphysics, cited in the third objection of the same article. “What is
free is sui causa” (“cause of itself ” or “self-determining”).50 He clarifies this
in his response. “Freedom is the cause of its own movement, because by
their freedom human beings move themselves to act.”51 These themes are
repeated in the first question of Part I-II, and one citation brings them to-
gether very succinctly: “Those things that have reason, move themselves to
an end, because they have dominion over their actions through their free-
dom, which is the faculty of will and reason.”52
These, then, are some of the ideas associated with freedom: a judg-
ment that is not determined, the ability to seek different things, the inde-
termination of reason, having control over one’s actions, self-movement,
self-determination. In the third article of ST I.83 Aquinas makes more ex-
plicit what is at the heart of each of these characterizations of freedom:
choice. “The proper act of freedom is choice [electio]: for we say that we
are free because we can take one thing while refusing another, and this is
to choose.”53
Now two things concur in choice: one on the part of the cognitive power, the
other on the part of the appetitive power. On the part of the cognitive power,
deliberation [consilium] is required, by which one thing is judged [diiudicatur]
to be preferred to another; and on the part of the appetitive power, it is required
that the appetite should accept the judgment of deliberation.54

48. ST I.83:1c. 49. ST I.83:1c.

50. ST I.83:1obj3. Citing Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1:2, 982b25. For an English version, see Ar-
istotle, The Metaphysics: Books I–Ix, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. Hugh Tredennick, The Loeb Classi-
cal Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933).
51. ST I.83:1ad3.
52. ST I-II.1:2c. He cites Peter Lombard, II Sent., 24, 3. Cf. ST I.83:2obj2.
53. ST I.83:3c. 54. ST I.83:3c.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 207

So there are two elements to any choice: a rational preference and a will-
ing acceptance. Choice always involves a double movement: it is (i) judg-
ing what is to be preferred and (ii) accepting the judgment. Or to put in an-
other way, it is the unified movement of allowing the judgment of preference
through its acceptance. It seems, to put it crudely, as if the cognitive power
first does all the hard work of determining what is best to do, and then the
will just rubber stamps this. We should not, however, be misled by the de-
scription of this sequence. It does not imply that the “choice” of which path
to follow is made solely by the judgment of deliberation, as if the intellect
can always provide us with sufficient reason to prefer one course of action
rather than another, and the will simply ratifies this irrefutable judgment.
Aquinas is insistent that choice is a function of the cognitive and appetitive
powers working together, and nothing is actually chosen unless the will ac-
cepts what is understood to be preferable. His reply to the second objection
is highly nuanced.
Judgment [iudicium] is a sort of conclusion and termination of deliberation
[consilium]. Now deliberation is terminated [determinatur], first, by the sen-
tence [sententia] of reason; secondly, by the acceptance of the appetite: whence
the Philosopher says in Ethics 3 that, “having formed a judgment by delibera-
tion, we desire in accordance with that deliberation.” And in this sense choice
itself is a kind of judgment [quoddam iudicium] from which freedom [liberum
arbitrium, “free decision”] takes its name.55

At first sight this text might seem to confirm the sequential descrip-
tion of understanding and willing introduced in the body of the article: the
will (inevitably) follows the reason. Yet two enormously important qual-
ifications are made here. First, deliberation, which might seem to be an
independent rational process, is not in fact “terminated” or “determined”
(determinatur) without the intervention of the will. In one sense it is still
true to say that the reason determines the final deliberation, since (if the
deliberation takes place) there is nothing apart from the sentence of rea-
son for the will to accept. But on the other hand, without the conclud-
ing acceptance of the will, there is no deliberation, and the reason remains
ineffective. In this sense, it is possible to say that the will determines the
deliberation, since it determines whether any particular judgment of rea-

55. ST I.83:3ad2. Citing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 3:3, 1113a12.

208 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

son ultimately becomes effective. Deliberation is not complete (and there-

fore a preference is not made) until the will accepts the sentence of reason.
So the function of the will is not simply to accept (or reject) the conclu-
sions of deliberation, it actually plays a part in bringing deliberation to a
conclusion about what is preferable. The integrated work of choice, which
involves reason and will, is what brings the deliberation to a close. The
second qualification made in this response is that choice (effected by the
understanding and the will) is itself a kind of judgment, and it is not just
the carrying out of a previous judgment made by the understanding in de-
liberation.
The background assumption to this article is that the sentence given
by reason is inconclusive, which is why it can only be concluded and de-
termined if it is finally accepted by the will. This is not true of all decisions.
We often make a decision without choosing, if we rationally work out that
one solution is clearly the best. Yet when we face a choice, we find that two
or more options are acceptable according to the sentence of reason. They
may be acceptable in different ways, but they are nevertheless both ratio-
nally acceptable. This is the very reason we have a choice. The “reason” we
have to choose is that there are no compelling reasons to act, or put an-
other way, that there are too many conflicting reasons to act. We can think
of trivial and serious examples: we have to choose between eating an ap-
ple or a pear, between watching the sport or the comedy on television, be-
tween giving oneself up to the police or escaping into lifelong exile, be-
tween forgiving someone or hating that person. In each case our reason
can see the sense of each alternative action and may be unable to decide
between them on rational grounds alone. We have to make a choice, which
involves actually accepting one option when both are acceptable in theory,
which involves actually preferring one option when both are preferable in
theory.
These nuances from ST I.83 are apparent in the question about choice
in ST Part I-II. Choice, Aquinas writes, involves both reason and will. “The
will tends to its object, according to the order of reason, since the appre-
hensive power presents its object to the appetite.”56 This implies an orderly
sequence, and might suggest that the reason compares the various options
and determines which single option is preferable, as if there were a kind

56. ST I-II.13:1c.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 209

of rational necessity involved for anyone who is thinking properly. But the
whole point is that we have to make choices when one option is not obvi-
ously better, when numerous options all make sense, and when each one
could reasonably be chosen. John Finnis emphasizes this and is highly crit-
ical of theories that might obscure the fact that for Aquinas choice is be-
tween rational, viable alternatives. “Any deliberation which ends in choice
must have yielded, not one judgment affirming the choiceworthiness of an
option awaiting adoption by the will, but (at least) two judgments.”57 Aqui-
nas makes this clear in the following article when he repeats what we have
already learnt, that the will, unlike the sensitive appetite shared with ani-
mals, is “indeterminate in respect of particular goods.”58
Since choice is the taking of one thing in preference to another it must of ne-
cessity relate to several things that can be chosen [necesse est quod electio sit re-
spectu plurium quae eligi possunt]. Consequently in those things which are alto-
gether determinate to one there is no place for choice.59

Kevin Flannery draws attention to the fact that for Aquinas, and not
for some of his neo-Scholastic interpreters, there is still a choice to make
even after the intellect has made all the judgments that it can:
If the process of practical reasoning truly leads to choice [electio], at the thresh-
old of choice, there must yet exist options among which the agent chooses. The
scholastic ordered pairings consilium-consensus/iudicium-electio suggests that
the job of voluntas is to deliver propulsion (by consensus and electio) to what
is decided only in intellect (consilium and iudicium). The genuinely Thomistic
order, on the other hand—consilium, iudicium, consensus, electio—makes it ap-
parent that the entire moral agent is present right at the very threshold of going
into action.60

The Inconclusiveness of Reason

So freedom is associated with choice, and choice with indetermination.
Aquinas thus has a very distinctive explanation of our freedom to choose:
it derives from the fact that in practical matters reason itself is undeter-

57. Finnis, “Object and Intention in Moral Judgments According to Aquinas,” 5–6.
58. ST I-II.13:2c.
59. ST I-II.13:2c.
60. Kevin L. Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2001), 163.
210 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

mined. In this central respect, Aquinas’s thinking about freedom is iden-

tical to that of Sartre, who believes that we are free because there are dif-
ferent, irreconcilable ways of thinking about the reality of our present
situation. This does not make freedom irrational.
Aquinas links freedom with the indetermination of reason in a num-
ber of key passages. In the first article of ST I.83, for example, he argues that
our practical judgments are free and that we can incline ourselves to differ-
ent goods because we are reasoning about particular, contingent things.
This type of reasoning, like dialectical and rhetorical argument, does not
lead to a single, scientifically demonstrable conclusion.
In such matters the judgment of reason may follow different courses, and is not
determined towards one [iudicium rationis ad diversa se habet, et non est deter-
minatum ad unum]. And insofar as the human being is rational is it necessary
that the human being be free.61

Aquinas’s view is startling: Practical reasoning about contingent things is

necessarily inconclusive. So when, for example, we examine our lives and
the situation before us, taking into consideration all the relevant facts, try-
ing to work out what we shall do, we will always find that no single answer
presents itself. The most meticulous analysis of all the available data, the
most clear-sighted view of the issues involved, will be inconclusive and will
leave us facing alternative courses of action. This will not be because we
have missed something, it is part of the nature of paying full attention to the
situation and thinking about it carefully. A single present allows for mul-
tiple possible futures; a single human situation allows for multiple possible
actions. This is exactly the way that Sartre understands the experience of
anguish. Existential anguish is not some kind of primeval terror in the face
of life or panic in the face of commitment, it is simply one’s appreciation of
the inconclusiveness of reason. In anguish we realize that when we examine
our past and our present they cannot guide us into a single future and de-
termine our actions. Knowledge of what is always proves to be insufficient.
In Sartre’s language, human existence cannot be determined by essence, by
our nature or the nature of the world. When we confront the totality of be-
ing, and bring to bear the full resources of our intellect and reason, we find
that there are further unresolved questions about how we should exist.

61. ST I.83:1c.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 211

The inconclusiveness of reason in practical matters concerns above all

the determination of which good we shall seek and what our end should
be. In ST I-II.13:6c Aquinas gives the reason unlimited flexibility in its abil-
ity to see particular things (but not the perfect good which is happiness) as
desirable or not.
Now the reason can apprehend as good, not only this, “to will” or “to act,” but
also this, “not to will” or “not to act.” Again, in all particular goods, the reason
can consider the aspect of having some good, and the lacking some good, which
has the aspect of bad [potest considerare rationem boni alicuius, et defectum ali-
cuius boni, quod habet rationem mali]: and in this respect, it can apprehend any
single one of such goods as to be chosen or to be avoided.62

This is a huge claim—that any concrete thing at all can always be seen as
good in one way, or as not good. Choice is not just about those rare mo-
ments when we stand before two finely balanced and incompatible options.
Aquinas says that we can always see more than one way of acting, because
we can always see an aspect of good and an aspect of bad in any option, and
therefore we can always discover reasons for doing it and reasons for not
doing it. It is part of the nature of reason for Aquinas that it can observe
present reality in different ways. The world has multiple possible meanings.
The particular situations we encounter always and necessarily give rise to
more than one conception of what is good, more than one practical option,
more than one possible future. It can’t be emphasized enough that it is rea-
son that does this. Reason discovers that there is no necessity about any sin-
gle interpretation of the good—this is not because of a failure of reason.
Aquinas addresses this question of necessity in the same article (13:6).
The second objection is very forceful, and he accepts its argument: If there
is a necessity about the prior judgment of reason, then it seems there will
be a necessity about the choice. In other words, if we have to think that
something is good, then we will inevitably choose it. In the body of his re-
ply he restates his central contention. “The human being does not choose
of necessity. And this is because that which is possible not to be, is not
of necessity [quod possibile est non esse, non necesse est esse].”63 In other
words, we can choose, without necessity, because of the possible not-being

62. ST I-II.13:6c.
63. ST I-II.13:6c.
212 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

of the options. What makes them options is their conditionality, the fact
that they could be and therefore that they are not, the fact that they do not
come about as a necessary consequence of the being of the world that is.
“Being” (the reality of the present situation) gives rise to “nonbeing” (the
possible futures that are not yet determined) through the mediation of rea-
son. The element of negation is as important for Aquinas as it is for Sartre.
When we face a choice we face options that precisely do not exist, they do
not flow out of the present constitution of the universe with any necessity.
These options have to be made to be through the choice, and that is why it
is not possible for there to be any necessity in the reasoning involved in a
choice. David Gallagher writes about how important it is for Aquinas that
human beings are free to understand things in different ways and not just
free to act:
Does the agent have control over how the options appear? This question cuts
to the heart of the matter. If we say that choice and action depend upon how
various goods appear to a person, and if a person does not control how these
goods appear, then the person’s action will not truly be free—able to be other-
wise—nor will the person be morally responsible for it. If goods simply appear
to an agent as they appear, then to characterize the will as rational appetite leads
us into a form of psychological determinism, a determinism incompatible with
freedom and responsibility.64

Gallagher explains that for Aquinas the agent exercises control over the
very act of reason that governs his or her choice. “How objects appear, in
terms of good or evil, is not simply a question of those objects taken inde-
pendently of a particular agent, but rather depends in large measure on the
agents themselves.” An agent’s “contribution” to the appearances is always
to some extent voluntary or willed.65
Aquinas’s specific replies to the first two objections of ST I-II.13:6 con-
tain two remarkable glosses on the nature of the type of reasoning that
takes place in practical judgments. The first response runs:
The conclusion does not always of necessity follow from the principles, but only
when the principles cannot be true if the conclusion is not true. In like man-

64. David M. Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” Archiv für
Geschichte der Philosophie 76 (1994): 248.
65. Ibid., 249.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 213
ner, the end does not always necessitate in the human being the choosing of the
means, because the means are not always such that the end cannot be gained
without them; or, if they be such, they are not always considered in that light.66

One end can be achieved in different ways. One set of principles can lead
the reason to a number of different conclusions. The reason by itself can-
not “decide” which of these reasons is to be followed, because they are all
reasonable. The second response adds:
The reason’s decision or judgment of what is to be done is about things that are
contingent and possible to us. In such matters the conclusions do not follow
of necessity from absolutely necessary principles [non ex necessitate sequuntur
ex principiis necessariis absoluta necessitate], but from principles necessary only
given a condition [sed necessariis solum ex conditione]; as, for instance, “If he is
running, he is in motion.”67

So in these cases when there are many legitimate conclusions, multiple fu-
tures, the only way that a single conclusion is reached is when a condition
is inserted that turns the principle into the kind of principle that requires
a single answer. In other words, we have to create the conditions in which
one conclusion will make sense.
Let’s say that a woman has to choose whether to take option A or option
B in order to achieve the goal X. Let’s accept that these are viable options,
they arise from the reality of her situation and the possibilities available to
her. X is the end, the guiding principle, which serves as the principle in a
practical judgment. Perhaps she wants a salary and has to choose between
being a teacher or a car mechanic; perhaps she wants a holiday and has to
choose between traveling to Brighton or Bournemouth. She already knows
that both options (A and B) lead to X—this is the very reason she has a di-
lemma. If she chooses A, all the specific benefits of A will accrue (together
with the goal X); if she chooses B, all the specific benefits of B will accrue
(together with the goal X). She cannot come to an unconditional conclu-
sion on the basis of reason alone. She can only conclude that A is the cor-
rect conclusion if she first decides to build the conditions of A into the
very principle X from which she is trying to derive A. A will be the con-
clusion that derives from her desire for X only if she sees the problem (and

66. ST I-II.13:6ad1.
67. ST I-II.13:6ad2.
214 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

the solution) in terms of A, and decides to appreciate the specific benefits

arising from A. There is a fundamental insufficiency about X.
This radical insufficiency of reason to come to a practical conclusion
actually reflects a superabundance and not an insufficiency of viable op-
tions.68 It manifests itself when we find we have consented to more than
one option:
It may happen that through deliberation several means have been found condu-
cive to the end, and since each of these meets with approval, consent is given to
each [in quodlibet eorum consentitur]; and from the many options that are ap-
proved, we give our preference to one by choosing it [sed ex multis quae placent,
praeaccipimus unum eligendo].69

Aquinas could not be clearer here about the remarkable fact that we can
approve of and consent to many options at the same time. “Since each of
these meets with approval, consent is given to each [dum quodlibet placet,
in quodlibet eorum consentitur].” In these cases the reason alone is not able
to find a preference. In fact, a preference is not something that is found,
it is made or given to one option by choosing or in the very choosing (eli-
gendo).
The similarities with Sartre’s understanding of freedom are striking. A
reasoned analysis of the situation produces many possible courses of ac-
tion. None of them arises from the facts before one with any inevitability,
none of them makes a claim on us with any necessity. Reason alone is insuf-
ficient for determining our ends. The characters in Being and Nothingness
are confronted with many options: to gamble or to walk away, to continue
the journey or to give up, to suffer in silence or to rebel. They are aware
that nothing determines the future for them—nothing about themselves
or their situation. The totality before them gives rise to alternative possible
outcomes. They have to go beyond this totality and freely project them-
selves into a specific future that is not determined. They determine it for
themselves by choosing to act for one good out of many possible goods.
They allow themselves to be motivated by one set of reasoning by acting
for a specific end, and this free choice to seek one end is what gives le-
68. This is one reason why Yves Simon insists that the key to Thomistic freedom is super-
determination and not indetermination; see Yves R. Simon, Freedom of Choice (New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 1969), 152–53.
69. ST I-II.15:3ad3.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 215

gitimacy to this specific set of reasons. They can do this because they are
not trapped within being-in-itself. Their being is to exist beyond being as
being-for-itself. In Aquinas’s scheme it is reason that allows us to see the
alternative possibilities for good within being, and the will that allows us
actively to project ourselves toward one of these possibilities. The reason
liberates us from necessity and the will re-creates a kind of conditional ne-
cessity that is based on the freely chosen end.
In the view of both Aquinas and Sartre, we are free to act (in one way
rather than another) because we are free to reason and to understand the
good (in one way rather than another). An English phrase captures this
nicely: the act of choosing is often called “making up one’s mind.”70 The
judgment of preference takes place in the very choosing, and one’s will is
one’s capacity to shape oneself by responding to reasons.71 This means that
in their choices human beings are freely deciding how they will under-
stand the world, what they will prefer, and where their lives are going. We
should note that Aquinas’s account of choice, like Sartre’s, does not just ap-
ply to those dramatic “Moments of Decision” when we hesitate before an
agonizing dilemma that will determine the direction of our life and the
quality of our character.72 Whenever an action is “up to us,”73 whenever we
could have done otherwise, we then have to choose to do it. Both the sea-
soned Mafia hit man and the loyal charity worker may go about their busi-
ness without much reflection or hesitation, but they are still freely choos-
ing to do their work and fully responsible for it. They could have done
otherwise, if only by not acting.
Aquinas connects the fact that there are alternative contingent solu-
tions to practical dilemmas with our ability to deal with universals. Hu-
man knowledge is not tied to particular, material things, and for this rea-
son we can—as it were—direct and apply our ideas to various things by our
free choice. If an architect had only a particular material form of a house
in mind, one that was already individualized, then he would not be able to

70. See Joseph M. Boyle, Germain Grisez, and Olaf Tollefsen, Free Choice: A Self-Referen-
tial Argument (South Bend, Ind., and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 13.
71. See John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 66–70.
72. See Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts, 162–66. The examples that follow are based on Flan-
nery’s.
73. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3:5, 1113b6.
216 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

build any other type of house, since there would be only one concrete idea
determining his thinking and motivating his actions. (For example, if an
architect were using some off-the-shelf plans for a three-bedroomed, two-
story house made of wood and glass that had already been constructed a
hundred times.) But architects usually start with universal forms (e.g., “a
family home,” “an office block”) that can be realized in different concrete
ways. Aquinas explains this in De malo 6:
An intellectual form is a universal, under which many things can be compre-
hended [Forma intellecta est universalis, sub qua multa possunt comprehendi].
Hence, since acts are concerned with singulars, among which there is none that
is equal to the potentiality of the universal, the inclination of the will remains
indeterminately related to many things [remanet inclinatio voluntatis indeter-
minate se habens ad multa]; for example, if an architect conceives the form of a
house in a universal, under which houses of different shapes are comprehended,
his or her will can be inclined to build a house that is square or circular or of
some other shape.74

The same building analogy is used in a question about the divine will in De
veritate, but here Aquinas connects the universality of human reason not
only with the architect’s ability to embody universal ideas in different par-
ticular ways, but also with the architect’s ability to decide whether to build
the house or not.
Because the form of the house in the mind of the architect is the idea of the
house taken absolutely [ratio domus absoluta], of itself not disposed any more
to existence than to non-existence or to existence in one particular way rather
than in another [magis ad esse quam ad non esse, nec ad sic quam ad aliter esse],
as far as the accidental features of the house go, the architect’s inclination in re-
gard to making the house or not remains free.75

Once again, the future is not determined by the being of the present. The
ratio absoluta of the house is not disposed more to existence or to nonex-
istence, nor to one kind of embodiment rather than another. So knowl-
edge gives us an indifference to being, an ability to decide whether some-
thing shall be or not be. The fact that we can abstract immaterial forms

74. DM 6c [287–96].
75. DV 23:1c.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 217

and think about things in general is what allows us to go beyond the total-
ity of the present and envisage what does not have to be, which is another
way of saying that we envisage what could be. Possibility and the condi-
tional tense only emerge through this process of stepping back from con-
crete being (making a deeper sense of it, through knowledge) and stepping
forward beyond concrete being (seeing the possibilities, through practical
reasoning about human action). We don’t just know that the future is open
and undetermined—it is our knowledge that makes the future undeter-
mined. Human knowledge introduces the potential being of multiple hu-
man actions through the actual nonbeing of the single understood form.
Our ability to deal with universals which do not exist in concrete reality is
what frees us from necessity and determination. Alan Donagan summa-
rizes Aquinas’s view in this way:
[Freedom] is wholly a matter of the non-necessity of any judgment a man can
arrive at by his natural powers as to the goodness of an end or the suitability of
a means. Even when will seems to fly in the face of intellect, there is always a
(foolish, perhaps vicious) judgment which directs it.76

Donagan points out that to his immediate successors Aquinas seemed to

be affirming the priority of intellect over will, but as we shall now see there
is a particular kind of priority that belongs to the will.

The Influence of the Will over Reason

If reason itself cannot determine what is to be done, what does? If in
questions of human action “the judgment of reason may follow opposite
courses, and is not determinate to one,”77 what finally determines that a
certain judgment be made? Aquinas believes it to be the will. One has to be
extremely careful about the way this is phrased in order to avoid misinter-
preting him. The will determines that a certain judgment be made, while
the reason determines the nature of the judgment actually made. The will
and reason working together in this way constitute our freedom. We have
seen that the acceptance by the will of a set of reasoning is what completes
a choice. In practical matters, which are necessarily open-ended, we pre-
fer something by willing one understanding of the good. Now in this sec-

76. Donagan, “Thomas Aquinas on Human Action,” 652–53.

77. ST I.83:1c.
218 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

tion we can investigate this movement of the will that concludes the act of
choice.
Aquinas touches on the activating power of the will in a number of ar-
ticles, some of which we have looked at in chapter 4. The will as an effi-
cient cause [per modum agentis] moves the intellect and all the powers of
the soul, “because wherever we have order among a number of active pow-
ers, that power which regards the universal end moves the powers which
regard particular ends.”78 With respect to their exercise, the will moves the
other powers of the soul to their acts, “for the end and perfection of ev-
ery other power is included under the object of the will as some particu-
lar good,” and the will moves the other powers to their particular ends as it
seeks the universal end.79 As to the exercise of its act, “no object moves the
will necessarily, for no matter what the object be, it is in one’s power not
to think of it, and consequently not to will it actually.”80 This is true even
of the universal good of happiness, because a person “is able not to will to
think of happiness at a certain moment, since even the very acts of the in-
tellect and the will are particular acts.”81
ST I-II.10:2 contains perhaps the most unambiguous description of the
decisive role of the will in determining human action. The question con-
cerns whether the will is moved by its object of necessity. Aquinas writes:
If the will be offered an object which is good universally and from every point
of view, the will tends to it of necessity, if it wills anything at all; since it cannot
will the opposite. If, on the other hand, the will is offered an object that is not
good from every point of view, it will not tend to it of necessity. And since lack
of any good implies some non-goodness [quia defectus cuiuscumque boni habet
rationem non boni], consequently, that good alone which is perfect and lacking
in nothing, is such a good that the will cannot not-will it: and this is happiness.
Whereas any other particular goods, in so far as they are lacking in some good,
can be regarded as non-goods [alia autem quaelibet particularia bona, inquan-
tum deficiunt ab aliquo bono, possunt accipi ut non bona]: and from this point of
view, they can be set aside or approved by the will, which can tend to one and
the same thing from different points of view [quae potest in idem ferri secundum
diversas considerations].82

78. ST I.82:4c. 79. ST I-II.9:1c.

80. ST I-II.10:2c. 81. DM 6c [438–40].
82. ST I-II.10:2c.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 219

We can notice the following points: (A) If the will is actually in the pro-
cess of willing, then it is not free not to seek the perfect good in happiness.
So there is a general necessity about willing our final end. (B) Apart from
the perfect good, absolutely any other good at all can be viewed as good or
as not good. In other words, even though Aquinas insists that the object
specifies the act and the reason determines what is good, nevertheless the
object and the reason alone can never “specify” which specification of the
good will motivate the act. Reason supplies too much information—it can
never present the will with a single, indisputable possible good (apart from
the perfect end). (C) Particular goods can be either set aside or approved
by the will (possunt repudiari vel approbari a voluntate). This is crucial.
Even though Aquinas sometimes simplifies his account and suggests, as
we have seen, that the cognitive power alone (through deliberation) judges
what is preferable,83 nevertheless deliberation itself is not terminated with-
out the acceptance of the will,84 and a preference cannot be given without
the affirmation of the will that closes choice.85 (D) When the will sets aside
or approves a particular object, when it accepts one good rather than an-
other, this is because it sets aside or approves of a point of view which is
reasonable, which is one legitimate way of understanding this object. So
the will is not going against reason; rather the will is selecting one reason
from among many. The act is still specified solely by the goodness of the
object as presented by reason. It is the object that moves and determines
the act as its specifying principle, the object that makes it this act and not
another.86
In a passage from De malo 6 Aquinas gives three factors that might
incline the will to consider a good in one way rather than another, three
“reasons” why we might take one point of view on an issue rather than an-
other:
That the will is drawn to that which is presented to it more according to this
particular condition rather than another, can occur in three ways. In one way,
inasmuch as one condition is of greater weight [in quantum una preponderat],
and then the will is moved according to reason; as, say, when a person prefers

83. ST I.83:3c. 84. ST I.83:3ad2.

85. ST I-II.13:2c and I-II.15:3ad3.
86. The object of the intellect is “universal being and truth” (ens et verum universale), as
Aquinas writes in ST I-II.9:1c.
220 = h u m a n f r e e d o m
that which is useful for health rather than what is useful for pleasure. In an-
other way, inasmuch as a person thinks about one particular circumstance and
not about another, and this often happens because some situation comes about,
either from within or from without [per aliquam occasionem, exhibitam vel ab
interiori ab exteriori], in such a way that such a thought occurs to him. In a
third way, this occurs on account of a person’s disposition [ex dispositione homi-
nis]: because as the Philosopher says, “as each one is, so does the end appear to
him.” Hence the will of an angry person and the will of a calm one are moved to
something in different ways, because the same thing is not suitable to each; just
as food is regarded in different ways by a healthy person and a sick one.87

The three factors that might influence my will are thus: (i) the objective
importance of the options before me (their “weight”); (ii) my particular
situation insofar as it influences my way of thinking (where this situation
includes what is happening in my inner life as well as the world in which I
exist); and (iii) my character. I might buy a cake either because I am hun-
gry and need some nourishment; or because [externally] I happen to be
walking past a shop with an enticing advertisement for cakes outside; or
because [internally] I am daydreaming about a cooking program I saw on
television; or because I am gluttonous and want to satisfy my gluttony.
Aquinas says that only in the first case is the will moved according to
reason. This fits with our everyday assumptions—that when we are be-
ing enticed by advertisements, or swayed by external pressures, or driven
by a particular character trait, we are not being completely rational. But
this has to be read carefully. Aquinas does not mean that in the other two
cases the option chosen is not rational. He has already explained that the
very reason why we can consider something to be good and still decide
not to will it is that other things, at the same time, can also be considered
good or fitting. With regard to any good (apart from the complete good
of happiness), “a person will be able to will its opposite, even while think-
ing about it, since perhaps it [the opposite] is good or fitting according
to some other particular consideration; as, for instance, what is good for
health is not good so far as enjoyment is concerned, and so on in regard to
other things.”88 So even when, against the objective advice of reason, the
will considers a lesser good, and inclines to that instead, it is still some-
87. DM 6c [450–467]; quoting Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 3:5, 1114a32–b1.
88. DM 6c [444–49].
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 221

thing that reason understands to be good in the terms of the particular

consideration at hand. In this sense, the will is not being irrational when
it chooses pleasure over health (cf. Aquinas’s example), or excitement over
safety, or the short term over the long term—it is simply allowing reason
to consider another particular object as good and suitable in another light.
Nor does Aquinas suggest that the will is less free when influenced by the
circumstances of the moment or by one’s character.
The whole point of this section of De malo 6c [418–84] is to show
how there is no necessity in the movement of the will, even with regard
to the specification of the act. The will can allow itself to be inclined to a
“weighty” long-term good that has been prioritized by reason; or to a good
that has a special attraction to it in these circumstances; or to a good that
appeals in a particular way to a person of such a character. In neither of
these three cases is the will drawn with any necessity or compulsion; and
in all three cases the particular end under consideration can be presented
in such a light that it seems good or fitting (bonum vel conveniens) to rea-
son.
In an article about choice from De veritate Aquinas is slightly fuller
in his description of the distinctive role of the will and its relation to the
“weighing up” done by reason. He is discussing the nature of choice:
Choice is the final acceptance [ultima acceptio] of something to be carried out.
This is not the business of reason but of will [quod quidem non est rationis, sed
voluntatis]; for, however much reason puts one ahead of the other, there is not
yet the acceptance of one in preference to the other as something to be done un-
til the will inclines to the one more than to the other. The will does not of ne-
cessity follow reason [Nam quantumcumque ratio unum alteri praefert, nondum
est unum alteri praeacceptatum ad operandum, quousque voluntas inclinetur in
unum magis quam in aliud: non enim voluntas de necessitate sequitur rationem].
Choice is nevertheless not an act of the will taken absolutely but in its relation
to reason, because there appears in choice what is proper to reason: the putting
of one next to the other or the putting of one before the other [conferre unum
alteri, vel praeferre]. This is found in the act of the will from the influence of
reason: reason proposes something to the will, not as useful simply, but as the
more useful to the end.89

89. DV 22:15c.
222 = h u m a n f r e e d o m
Once again it must be emphasized that the reason is not proposing a single rea-
sonable plan of action that is automatically approved by the will. Sometimes al-
ternative plans of action cannot be ordered by the reason, they are all equally
reasonable, and the reason “puts them next to one another” (conferre). Some-
times the reason puts one plan before the others (praeferre)—but without los-
ing sight of the viability and reasonableness of the alternatives. In neither case
is the will obliged to prefer one alternative as ground for action (ad operandum)
rather than another. The inclination of the will to one rational plan, which is
the ultimate cause of action, is not necessarily determined by the order given by
reason. There couldn’t be a clearer statement of the determining influence of the
will. Aquinas’s own words, however, could mislead us here. When he writes that
the will does not of necessity follow reason he means here that it does not follow
the ordering (praeferre) which reason gives among rival plans. It still, however,
follows the reasonableness of the chosen option. As he goes on to say, choice is
always an act of the will in relation to reason, and the option preferred by the
will is always therefore a reasonable one that has been proposed (even if it is a
lower ranking proposal) by reason.

Stephen Brock draws attention to the role of the will in making the
preference.90 When we reason about possible actions, “it can happen that
both “measure up” and that neither is a clear winner.” If taking one ex-
cludes the other, then the decision is simply “up to you.”
You refuse one when all conditions needed for your accepting it are present,
and you accept the other when all conditions needed for refusing it are pres-
ent. [.....] The will moves toward one thing despite a sufficient attraction toward
something excluding it; this is a choice, a taking one thing in the face of an-
other, a preference. This is not at all to say that the choice is not informed by a
judgment. The chooser must have formed a judgment declaring the preferabil-
ity of what he chose. Only, he also formed a judgment declaring the preferabil-
ity of the alternative he rejected. Nor are these two separate judgments; it is one
judgment, declaring one alternative preferable in some respect, and the other
preferable in another respect.91

90. He is commenting on ST I.83:3.

91. Stephen Brock, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (Edin-
burgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 170, footnote 75.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 223

So there are multiple practical truths, multiple possible acts, which all
make sense in different ways. Let’s call them different lines of reasoning.
Reason cannot decide between them, since reason is the very faculty that
has brought them to light. It is up to the will to prefer one way of reason-
ing and acting. This is free choice. It is simply the way that we activate a
reason. Note that it does not involve an additional, alternative, nonrational
apprehension of good. Stephen Brock puts it this way:
[The will is not] an additional source of objects or specificatory principles, out-
side or apart from those given by the intellect. Rather, the will plays a role in the
determination of its object precisely by playing a role in the process by which
the intellect comes to provide it with an object.92

The will is not determining what is good (the reason does this), it is de-
termining that one way of looking at one good should be activated, that
one project be followed. The only reason for doing X is X itself—as judged
by the reason. The movement of the will is necessarily in accord with the
good as it is presented by reason, but the movement itself is not caused by
the understanding of the good—it is caused by, indeed it is, the will’s very
attraction to this good. A choice is rational, indeed there is no such thing
as an irrational choice (since it must be between reasonable options)—yet
a choice is not rationally made.
The will, for Aquinas as for Sartre, is not against reason, it is what es-
tablishes it as something with practical relevance. The exercise of the will
is what gives momentum to the reasonableness of one way of reasoning,
which up to this moment had only a theoretical power. Why did we go to
the cinema instead of the bowling alley? Eat Italian instead of Mexican?
Talk about football instead of politics?
On the one hand, the action brings about its own explanation—we act
for the objective good sought. The only reason for eating Italian food is
because Italian food is good. But why do we not follow other reasons? Be-
cause of the reasonableness of the reasons that we do choose. There are no
further reasons to put into the equation. This is not voluntarism, for the
simple fact that the movement of the will toward this good is explained by
the objective rationality of the good in question. The fact that other goods
could also have been reasonably chosen does not alter this.

92. Ibid., 170, see 61–72.

224 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

On the other hand, there is no explanation beyond the freedom of the

one who acted.93 The goodness of Italian food is not enough to explain
the choice since Mexican food is equally good. We freely determine our-
selves to act in this way, to follow these reasons. I do this because I choose
to: that is the reason. There is something irreducible about the movement
of the will that results in a choice being made. It is a kind of unanalyzable
fact. A choice creates something new. This is still not voluntarism, since
the movement of the will is never made against reason or in isolation from
reason—it is the very thing that allows me to use my reason.
By choosing one way of reasoning we are giving priority to one notion
of good and orienting our life to a particular goal. Through our choices,
big and small, we are giving shape to our identity. John Finnis gives an ex-
ample of a scholar dedicated to the pursuit of the truth who abandons this
for a new cause such as fighting for his community or caring for his sick
wife (perhaps there are echoes of Sartre here). His new commitment has
not somehow become more reasonable; rather, the change in his chosen
life-plan has made the reasonableness of this new commitment more per-
suasive.
That chosen plan made truth more important and fundamental for him. His
new choice changes the status of that value for him; the change is in him. Each
of us has a subjective order of priority amongst the basic values.94

So Aquinas is neither an intellectualist nor a voluntarist. He believes

that we creatively determine which understanding of the good will moti-
vate our personal actions even though each understanding is determined
solely by the nature of the good as understood by reason. In other words,
the objectively understood good can be deeply personal. This is the kind of
moral synthesis so many contemporary thinkers struggle toward. Charles
Taylor, for example, is acutely aware that some ethical theories can deper-
sonalize human action. Choices are based on the objective values that our
disengaged reason discovers. Yet he knows that other theories that appeal
to the language of self-realization and subjective fulfillment run the risk
of losing sight of the objective good. Caught between rationalism and ro-
manticism, Taylor pursues a “search for moral sources outside the subject
93. See Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” for a particularly
fine account of all these issues.
94. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 93, see chapter IV, 81–97.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 225

through languages which resonate within him or her, the grasping of an

order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision”—he wants value
to be both objective and subjective.95 Aquinas describes just this “reso-
nance” in the language of intellect and will. The objective good must be
subjectively accepted; the reasonableness of a right action must be person-
ally willed by the agent. Aquinas’s action theory thus allows for a concept
of human autonomy that does not separate personal responsibility from a
rational understanding of the objective good.96
We are left not so much with the mystery of freedom as the fact of
freedom. To bring in the word “mystery” at this stage would not only be a
fudge, it would also be inaccurate—since it implies that something is be-
ing kept secret. It suggests that in the moment of choice there is some deep
knowledge philosophers can’t quite get to, some hidden piece of psycholog-
ical machinery we can’t quite pry open. But for Aquinas this is simply un-
true. The whole point of his account is to show that when absolutely every-
thing has been explained, when every factor has been taken into account,
when every possible point of view has been considered—both out there in
the world and in our own inner experience—then we are still left with al-
ternative rational possibilities, and the only way we can move forward is
by making a decision. The will is not something that finds out more (it is
rather the reason that finds things out), it is our ability to make a choice, to
take a decision, in the absence of higher reasons that would make the deci-
sion inevitable. It is, ultimately, our ability to live a particular life and give
it a particular shape.
There is nowhere further back to go than the very act of choice, which
establishes the agent as one who is now acting for this goal. The frustrated
questioner still wants to know why we make this choice, but this very de-
sire to know betrays a misunderstanding of the dilemma of choosing. In
the moment of deliberation, we don’t yet know what to do. We don’t know
(in the present) what we will choose (in the future) until we do actually
make the choice. We can’t look somewhere else for an answer. It is fair to
say that there simply is no answer—until we choose. There is no answer

95. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 510.
96. This idea of autonomy in Aquinas is brought out in Martin Rhonheimer, Natural Law
and Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2000), see esp. viii and 143.
226 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

for the agent about to decide, nor for the philosopher trying to analyze
the prehistory of the agent’s eventual decision, since both the agent and
the philosopher are trying to investigate the same thing. Choosing brings
about an answer that did not exist before, except as one possibility among
many. The recurring demand for more philosophical clarity here is under-
standable but misplaced, since it denies the very fact of freedom. The in-
quisitive philosopher is always trying to collapse this “future” choice into
the determinations of the past and present. But once again, the disconcert-
ing heart of Aquinas’s view is that the present, as it is understood by rea-
son, is not enough (because reason is undetermined), or rather it is too
much (because reason sees alternative possibilities), and it can only be de-
termined by an unanticipated movement of the will in the future choice—
which will still be perfectly explicable in terms of the end that is actually
chosen.

Intellectualist Readings of Aquinas

This whole approach to understanding the relationship between intellect
and will in Aquinas has been questioned by a number of recent commenta-
tors who follow a more “intellectualist” line.97 Broadly speaking, they deny
this so-called voluntarist interpretation, in which the will has some kind of
final control over its own activities, and they insist instead that its activities
are controlled by the intellect.98 So in the particular situation of choosing
between alternative rational goods it is not the will that inclines us to one
good (or to one consideration of the good) rather than to another; or if it
is the will, then this will is following the conclusions of the intellect about
which good is to be rationally preferred. This is not the place for a line-by-
line rebuttal of these intellectualist arguments. I hope that my own reading
of the Thomistic texts will have made another interpretation more attrac-

97. See, e.g., Jeffrey Hause, “Thomas Aquinas and the Voluntarists,” Medieval Philosophy
and Theology 6 (1997); P. S. Eardley, “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will,” Review
of Metaphysics 56 (2003); and Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. section 7.4, 221–33.
98. It is almost impossible not to use the words “voluntarist” and “intellectualist” when
discussing these arguments since these are the labels used in the literature to characterize ri-
val interpretations. So I reluctantly adopt these terms in this discussion. But one of the main
points of my own position is that even though Aquinas is not an intellectualist, this does not
make him a voluntarist, insofar as the good eventually chosen is always completely specified
solely by the intellect.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 227

tive. But at least I can point out some of the shortcomings of some these
other approaches.
Jeffrey Hause argues that Aquinas is a thoroughgoing intellectualist:
On Aquinas’s view, the will cannot, by any innate capacity, direct the intellect’s
attention, keep the intellect from issuing judgments about what one ought to
do, or keep itself from willing what the intellect has determined what one ought
to do. Nor can it select one from among a variety of alternatives unless the intel-
lect has first settled on that one as the alternative to be pursued. Which, if any,
of a set of objects the will wills, and whether it wills anything or nothing at all,
depends not on any voluntaristic capacity of the will, but on how the intellect
judges the object in question.99

He distinguishes between various kinds of voluntarism, highlights some

false assumptions in the voluntarist position, and points to some appar-
ently intellectualist texts. His main arguments, however, are more general
ones: (i) Yes, Aquinas admits that the will sometimes influences the intel-
lect even before the intellect passes judgment; but in this case the act of the
will is linked to previous judgments of the intellect.100 (ii) Aquinas never
says unambiguously that the will, without direction from practical reason,
selects from among the options presented to it.101 (iii) Yes, Aquinas fre-
quently attributes to the will control over which rational plan is chosen,
with no mention of any contribution by reason; but this is because “speak-
ing of the will’s control is a useful shorthand for speaking of the human be-
ing’s control.”102
There is some truth in these statements, but there is also something
slightly inconclusive in an appeal to what Aquinas doesn’t say and to what
he might be suggesting in shorthand. The real problem for Hause’s argu-
ment is that in the texts where Aquinas is specifically analyzing the rela-
tionship between intellect and will, their interdependence and their par-
ticular functions, he does give the will a power of control over the intellect
and its considerations, and he doesn’t say that this control is itself depen-
dent on the prior deliberations of the intellect. Hause insists that reason’s
role “is to evaluate goals and means and to make plans in accordance with

99. Hause, “Thomas Aquinas and the Voluntarists,” 168.

100. Ibid., 175. 101. Ibid., 177.
102. Ibid., 178.
228 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

its evaluations. [.....] The will always chooses in accordance with reason’s
decisions, and it always executes those decisions in accordance with rea-
son’s commands.”103 He pays too little attention, however, to the passages
where Aquinas explains that the reason is not always fully determined, and
that sometimes it finds that different options are equally preferable, or it
finds that the will rejects its rational priorities (and inclines to an object
that is good in another rational way).104
In this respect, Hause’s interpretation of ST I-II.13:6ad3 betrays his own
intellectualist inclinations. The question is about whether we choose out
of necessity or freely. The third objection proposes that a choice cannot be
free because from several objects we will necessarily choose whichever ap-
pears to be best. Aquinas replies (in Hause’s translation):
If two things are proposed (to the will) which are equal in one respect, nothing
prevents our considering in one of them some quality which makes it stand out,
and (so nothing prevents) the will’s being inclined to the one rather than to the
other.

Hause’s gloss on this “intellectualist reply” is: “Reason’s determination of

some point of superiority in one option over another is a necessary condi-
tion of the will’s choosing.”105 This is true in one sense, if it means that the
will can only incline to a good that the reason judges to be superior in a
certain respect—since the reason and never the will specifies its object. But
Hause intends us to understand that when faced with a range of options,
one of them will be superior, and the reason will determine this superior-
ity, and the will will then choose this predetermined superior option. He
wants to tie the movement of the will to the decision of the reason. This in-
terpretation cuts right against the very point Aquinas wishes to make. It’s
important to recall the objection: “If two or more things are available, of
which one appears to be more eligible [inter quae unum maius appareat], it
is impossible to choose any of the others. Therefore that which appears to
be best [quod eminentius apparet] is chosen of necessity.” We should hold
in mind that this is the objection. So Aquinas needs to find a reply against
the necessity of choosing whatever seems to be (rationally) best. The whole
point of the article, and of this third response, is to show that when numer-
103. Ibid., 178.
104. See DV 22:15c; ST I.83:1c; ST I-II.13:6; DM 6c; and my comments on them above.
105. Hause, “Thomas Aquinas and the Voluntarists,” 180.
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ous things are available, and one seems to be best, we still do not choose
out of necessity, because the reason can consider different things to be su-
perior in different ways. It is about the indetermination of reason, and the
fact that the will is free to move in different directions precisely because
the reason has not come up with any necessary conclusions, and is still
capable of entertaining various alternative considerations. The will is not
determined by the reason here; it is the will that “determines” which of
the many possible rational determinations will prevail. This is why, to re-
turn to the third objection, a hungry man can choose one appetizing dish
rather than another; it is also why he can choose what does not appear to
be best (eminentius apparet), and eat the tablecloth, or not eat at all.
P. S. Eardley, another interpreter in the “intellectualist” line, presents
a fair summary of David Gallagher’s argument that for Aquinas, when an
object and an act can be considered by the reason in different ways, it is the
will that controls which consideration will take priority, independently of
a prior determination of reason.106 Eardley argues that this view, however,
should not be attributed to Aquinas, but that it fits more with the teaching
of Giles of Rome, one of his pupils.
On Thomas’s account, the will can never act independently of a prior judgment
of reason, either as regards exercise or as regards specification. If the will desires
one object over another, this is because reason has apprehended it as better and
specified or determined the will’s act accordingly. Furthermore, whether or not
the will exercises its act or the other powers of the soul is also determined by a
prior act of the intellect.107

Yet Eardley provides very little evidence for rejecting Gallagher’s con-
clusions. He appeals once to Hause, without referring to his actual argu-
ments.108 And, in another place, like Hause, he accepts hypothetically the
main thrust of the “voluntarist” argument, only to insist that a thorough-
going intellectualism would nevertheless lie behind it: “Even if the will has
the ability to control how the object is ultimately regarded by the intel-
106. P. S. Eardley, “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will”; commenting on Da-
vid M. Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgement in Thomas Aquinas,” Archiv für Geschichte
der Philosophie 76 (1994).
107. P. S. Eardley, “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will,” 846.
108. “Aquinas cannot, as Gallagher would have it, be considered a voluntarist as regards
the self-motion of the will. Rather, as Hause has shown, he should be regarded as a thorough-
going intellectualist”; see Eardley, “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will,” 847.
230 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

lect, nonetheless, any such act has to have been itself determined by a prior
judgment of the intellect.”109 The evidence for this statement is the pas-
sage from ST I.82:4ad3, which I have already discussed in chapter 4 (“[But]
not every apprehension is preceded by a movement of the will”).110 What-
ever Aquinas is doing in this difficult passage, he is certainly not talking
about prior judgments of the intellect which might control how the will
then controls the considerations made by the intellect.111
Eardley continues his interpretation with a misreading of ST I-II.9:4.
Aquinas writes that “even with regard to its being moved to exercise its act,
it is necessary to posit that the will is moved by some external principle.”112
Eardley writes that “such an ‘external’ principle is deliberation (consilium),”
and uses this understanding to conclude that “the intellect both determines
whether the will should elicit an act or not and also what it should will.”113
But the “external principle” referred to in this article is quite clearly not
consilium—it is instead God. In the body of the article Aquinas explains
that we can only come to will the means to an end through a process of de-
liberation, and that this process of deliberating and willing cannot stretch
back indefinitely; and for this reason the original willing of the will must
come “by the impulse of some exterior mover [ex instinctu alicuius exterio-
ris moventis], as Aristotle concludes in a chapter of the Eudemian Ethics.”114
So the reference is to the transcendent cause of our willing, which lies in
God, and not to any particular (intellectual) principle within us. The refer-
ence to the Eudemian Ethics makes this very clear.115
Robert Pasnau gives a spirited intellectualist reading of various Thomis-
tic texts.116 The main problem is that by the end he loses spirit himself, and
becomes uneasy about the deterministic implications of this reading, and
about whether such implications are really true to Aquinas. He believes
that Aquinas’s theory of free decision is compatibilist, and gives two sub-
109. Ibid., 845.
110. See the section “Reflexivity of Intellect and Will.”
111. See my comments on this passage in chapter 4 above, in the section “Reflexivity of In-
tellect and Will.”
112. ST I-II.9:4c; Eardley’s translation, in P. S. Eardley, “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of
Rome on the Will,” 845–46.
113. P. S. Eardley, “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will,” 846.
114. ST I-II.9:4c.
115. Eudemian Ethics 7:14, 1248a18ff.
116. Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2002), esp. section 7.4, 221–33.
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tly different definitions of compatibilism. It means (i) that “freedom can

coexist with cognitive and volitional systems that function in entirely de-
terministic ways, necessitated by the sum of prior events”; and (ii) that hu-
man freedom can be explained “without any recourse to an uncaused, un-
determined act of will or intellect—as if only an uncaused decision could
count as a free decision.”117
Pasnau is not at all simplistic in his intellectualist account. He pays at-
tention to passages where a more “voluntaristic” reading seems required—
for example, to ST I-II.13:6c (there is no necessity in choice because “a hu-
man being can will and not will, do and not do, and can also will this or
that, and do this or that”); and to DV 22:15c (“[.....] the will does not fol-
low reason of necessity”).118 He moves the argument to the level of higher
order volitions, to the broader interests and longer term goals that guide
our everyday decision making. It is these higher level beliefs and desires
that give us a measure of control over our immediate judgments that is de-
nied to animals. He shows how the will can influence the intellect at this
higher level—for example, how some fixed dispositions and desires of the
will might override the more short-sighted dictates of reason.119 He sees
the relationship between reason and will in Aquinas as “a back-and-forth
exchange, extending over the course of our lives.”120 He recognizes that, in
his compatibilist reading, even though we control our acts through higher
order judgments and higher order volitions, this just moves the problem
back a step, and ultimately we have to say that our current choices have
been determined by the prior events and forces that have shaped us.121

117. Ibid., 221. In my understanding, Aquinas could certainly not support the first state-
ment because a lack of necessity in freedom is one of his constant refrains; but he could pos-
sibly support the second statement because he does not say that freedom is uncaused or un-
determined, since the intellect always determines the object of free decision (so the act itself
is never undetermined), and since freedom does not exclude various kinds of causes (e.g., the
transcendent cause of our natural desire for happiness).
118. Pasnau’s translations; ibid., 224 and 227.
119. Ibid., 228–29.
120. Ibid., 229.
121. Thomas J. Loughran gives a sophisticated defense of Aquinas’s apparent compatibilism
in his “Aquinas, Compatibilist,” in Human and Divine Agency: Anglican, Catholic, and Luther-
an Perspectives, ed. Michael F. McLain and Mark W. Richardson (Lanham, Md.: University
Press of America, 1999). He argues that what makes acts of human intellect and will contingent,
rather than necessary, even when they are determined by a full set of causal antecedents, is the
fact that the antecedents themselves are contingent, and that they are beyond the grasp of the
agent. In other words, our acts are fully determined, but because the contingent determining
232 = h u m a n f r e e d o m
How—the libertarian asks—could we then be free? The compatibilist has no de-
fense against this line of attack, other than to suggest that it is a mistake to sup-
pose ourselves so in control of our choices. It just is true that the causes of our
actions extend beyond our reach.122

This kind of response, Pasnau admits, seems to run against Aquinas’s re-
peated insistence that the movement of the will is in no way necessary.
He finds “hints” that Aquinas understands necessity in a way weaker than
libertarians would want; and then suggests that human beings are only
subject to a “conditional necessity” that results from the contingent cir-
cumstances of our environment and our history: “Given the entire state of
the universe, including an individual’s higher-order beliefs and desires, a
certain choice will inevitably follow”; “Human beings must make certain
choices, given (a) their natures, (b) the surrounding circumstances, and
(c) their higher-order beliefs and desires.”123 Pasnau finishes this section in
a slightly wistful manner:
It would be absurd to deny that animals do, in some sense, determine their
own actions. It would be equally absurd to deny that we determine our own ac-
tions, in a fundamentally deeper way. Perhaps we too do not escape the chains
of causal necessity. But if we are determined, we are determined by our own be-
liefs and values, not simpy by the brute design of nature and the happenstance
of events. This difference, for Aquinas, makes all the difference.124

The problem, on this compatibilist account, is that we are ultimately deter-

mined by the brute design of nature and the happenstance of events.125 This
is not just unfortunate (for us and for our freedom), it also denies the re-
peated statements by Aquinas that there is no necessity in our willing, and

forces are so diffuse and beyond our comprehension, we understand ourselves to be acting in-
dependently and without necessity. “Human beings experience independence from any mea-
sure of the causal antecedents to choice which they can comprehend” (15).
122. Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 231.
123. Ibid., 232.
124. Ibid., 233.
125. Loughran draws the same conclusions. “The compatibilist model leaves human be-
ings with exactly the measure of independence from proximate causal orders which reflec-
tion on human experience reveals [.....] . But that independence from proximate causal orders,
freedom from necessity in that sense, in no way implies independence from the entire order
of created causality.” He goes on to acknowledge that, for libertarians, this kind of freedom
“will seem plainly insufficient to preserve freedom; worse, it seems irrelevant”; see Thomas J.
Loughran, Human and Divine Agency, 18.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 233

that we do not choose out of necessity.126 I am not giving a detailed response

here to Pasnau’s large work. I am simply trying to expose the difficulty that
lies at the heart of any more intellectualist and compatibilist reading of
Aquinas’s act theory. The difficulty is that, however faithful such a theory
may seem to be to some of Aquinas’s arguments, it is not ultimately faithful
to his larger and often-stated concerns about freedom and the nonneces-
sity of human choices that this freedom must involve. Pasnau recognizes all
this. He tries to show that there is some kind of freedom left in our ability to
determine for ourselves our long-term goals. But then he gives up:
The libertarian will rightly object that for a compatibilist these goals and values
cannot really be up to us: they too must be determined by our nature and by the
surrounding circumstances. Adding higher-order links in the chain only pro-
longs and perhaps obscures the inevitable necessity of any particular choice.127

There is a valuable compatibilist action theory here. All I want to show is

that it is not Aquinas’s. By the end of this section, Pasnau seems to have ad-
mitted as much as he resigns himself to accepting that his reading involves
“the inevitable necessity of any particular choice.”

The Self-Movement of the Will

When the will prefers one plan of action by inclining to it, there is no prior
reason for this inclination (beyond the good sought)—it is the very exer-
cise of our freedom. “The proper act of freedom is choice: for we say that
we are free because we can take one thing while refusing another; and this
is to choose.”128 Aquinas’s explanation for this is simple, and it is more a
description than an explanation: the will moves itself. The will can “pass or
not pass into the act of willing with regard to anything at all” because “ani-
mate things are moved by themselves” [moventur a seipsis].129 Self-move-
ment gives us control over our actions and independence from the totality
of causes which press upon us.
Those things that have reason, move themselves [seipsa movent] to an end, be-
cause they have dominion over their actions through freedom, which is the fac-
ulty of will and reason.130

126. ST I.82:2; ST I-II.10:2, ST I-II.13:6; DM6; etc.

127. Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 233.
128. ST I.83:3c. 129. DV 22:6c.
130. ST I-II.1:2c, citing Peter Lombard, II Sent., 24, 3.
234 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

Self-movement belongs properly to the will and not to the intellect, since
the intellect is moved by the will to act, “but the will is not moved by an-
other power but by itself.”131 The idea of self-movement implies that the
fact of movement has no cause outside the occurrence of the movement it-
self. Aquinas states that “freedom is the cause of its own movement [causa
sui motus], because by one’s freedom one moves oneself [seipsum movet] to
act.”132 There is a kind of “immanent” operation here, which must, as Ste-
phen Brock explains, “be an activity which is immediately and simultane-
ously able to effect either one thing or its contrary.”133 It is no exaggeration
to say that self-movement is a kind of self-creation, since the self is consti-
tuted by its ends, and we choose our ends and therefore our self by moving
ourselves toward them.134
on this question of the will’s self-movement, De malo 6 is particularly
helpful.135 Aquinas is writing about the exercise of the act (i.e., whether an
end that is already understood by the reason in a particular way will actu-
ally be pursued), rather than the specification of the act (i.e., whether an end
will be understood by the reason in one way rather than another).136 He ex-
plains that “the will is moved by itself [voluntas movetur a se ipsa]: for just
as it moves the other powers, so also does it move itself [se ipsam movet].”137
He recognizes that this seems to imply a contradiction, since moving some-
thing normally involves one thing that is not in motion being moved by
another thing that is in motion. How can the will be both not in motion
and in motion at the same time? He writes that in this case the will is not
“both in potency and in act with regard to the same thing.”138 For just as
our knowledge of one thing leads us on an investigation that results in some
new knowledge, so the fact that we already will one thing (such as health)
leads us to will another thing (such as the taking of some medicine).

131. DM 6ad10.
132. But this doesn’t exclude God being the first cause of our freedom; see ST I.83:1ad3 and
below.
133. Brock, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action, 40, footnote 79.
134. This does not mean, as we shall see below, that the will is without a transcendent
cause that explains its original ability to move.
135. See DM 6c [360–415].
136. But it is important to remember that the will’s control over the exercise of an act also
has some bearing on the act’s specification, since any specification depends on a particular act
of the intellect that itself needs activating.
137. DM 6c [361–63].
138. DM 6c [364–65].
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Aquinas then makes two striking clarifications. First, we only will a

particular means (such as medicine) if we are willing to take counsel (con-
siliari) about how to achieve an already established end (such as health).
And given that the will moves itself by counsel, and “council is a kind of in-
vestigation that is not demonstrative but involving opposites, the will does
not move itself of necessity.”139 So the lack of necessity, the freedom, flows
from the fact that a will that is already willing a certain end can continue
willing that end in different rationally valid ways. The willing of a concrete
good (such as medicine) is thus never a new and self-generating act, it is
always part of an already established movement toward some greater goal.
This is what preserves both its freedom and its rationality.
The second clarification is about the transcendent cause of the will’s
overarching movement.140 Aquinas writes that even the act of taking coun-
sel must be willed, and that this act of will requires its own act of taking
counsel, which seems to lead to an infinite regression. Aquinas concludes
that the will must be moved “by something external, by the impulse of
which the will begins to will [ab aliquo exteriori, cuius instinctu voluntas
velle incipiat].”141 Given that the rational soul is immaterial, this initiating
force cannot be material—it must be something above the will and the in-
tellect, namely, God.142 But in this case God “moves the will according to
its condition: not from necessity but as indeterminately relating to many
things [voluntatem movet secundum eius conditionem, non ex necessitate set
ut indeterminate se habentem ad multa].”143 So the will is not the cause of its
own initial or originating movement. Aquinas’s whole theory rests on this
Aristotelian assumption that there is an “external” or “transcendent” source
of the will’s dynamism.144 But the will is moved according to its “condition”
or “nature” [conditio], which is to be open to many things in a way that is
indeterminate. It is, to use a slightly strained phrase, necessarily indetermi-
nate. In other words, the transcendent foundation of the will (in God) does
not take away from its freedom to move itself to different possible goods.

139. DM 6c [378–81]. 140. Cf. ST I-II.10:4 and I-II.109:2ad1.

141. DM 6c [390–91].
142. Aquinas refers to Aristotle’s conclusions in the chapter De bona fortuna of Aristotle’s
Eudemian Ethics, 8:2, 1248a16–29.
143. DM 6c [412–15].
144. Freedom, as Sartre has put it, is not its own foundation: we are “condemned to be
free”; see BN 485; EN 530/565.
236 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

To the suggestion that an external principle behind the will brings with
it some kind of coercion, Aquinas replies: “The will contributes something
when it is moved by God, for it is the will itself which acts [ipsa enim que
operator], although moved by God.”145 God makes the will to be what it is,
which is an inclination to happiness that can be embodied and fulfilled in
many different ways—and the decision about which way depends on the
human person and not on God. In a discussion of what happens when
the will makes a new choice, he writes that this change is effected by two
movers, “insofar as the will itself moves itself to act and insofar as it is also
moved by an external agent, namely God [in quantum ipsa voluntas movet
se ipsam ad agendum et in quantum etiam movetur ab alio exteriori agente,
scilicet Deo].”146 There is no contradiction for Aquinas between our radical
dependence on God as the transcendent foundation of our freedom, and
the radical independence of that freedom insofar as it allows us to deter-
mine our goals and thus constitute ourselves. To be human is to have the
possibility of creating a future that has not been predetermined; it is to go
beyond the bounds of necessity.
In ST I-II.6:1 Aquinas relates the possibility of the will’s self-movement
more specifically to knowledge of an end. He writes that a stone does not
move itself downward, even though the principle of this movement is in-
trinsic to the stone (and we might therefore be tempted to say that through
its own heaviness the stone thrusts itself downward). “But those things
which have a knowledge of the end are said to move themselves because
there is in them a principle by which they not only act but also act for
an end.”147 Irrational animals have an imperfect knowledge of their end
and consequently their acts have a kind of voluntariness [voluntarium]. Yet
these animals apprehend the end “without knowing it under the aspect of
the end, or the relationship of an act to an end.”148 Aquinas continues:
Perfect knowledge of an end goes with voluntary activity in its complete sense;
inasmuch as, having apprehended the end, a human being can, from deliberat-
ing about the end and the means thereto, be moved, or not, to gain that end.149

145. DM 6ad4 [512–14]. 146. DM 6ad17 [637–39].

147. ST I-II.6:1c. 148. ST I-II.6:2c.
149. ST I-II.6:2c.
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 237

We should notice the connection here between knowledge of an end and

self-movement. Aquinas could have said: We know the end, therefore we
can choose between various means. Instead he says: We know various
means to an end, therefore we can choose whether to seek the end or not.
It’s important to see that one deliberates here about the end as well as the
means, although the sense is that one deliberates about whether the end
of this action is desired as a means to a further end.150 In the reply to the
second objection Aquinas draws attention to the main theme of this chap-
ter, the fact that the movement of the will is not against reason but is fully
in accord with the disposition of the reason. The significant point here is
that there is no single disposition. The deliberating reason is indifferently
or equally disposed to opposite things (se habet ad opposita), and on ac-
count of this the will can be inclined to either (in utrumque potest).151
We have come full circle in the argument of this chapter. We started
by investigating human goods and ends. Now we find that the self-
movement involved in free choice depends on understanding the relation-
ship between a means and an end. Our knowledge of ends and our free-
dom are, in fact, the same thing. We are free because at any one moment
we can see different valid ways of acting, different goods, different selves—
any of which would make sense of the objective understanding we have of
the world and allow us to achieve our final end. This is Sartre’s “anguish.”
Our present identity does not give rise to a single future identity. Why
does one choose to do this rather than that? Because one chooses to be this
person. But why does one choose to be this person rather than that one?
Because one is this person—through the choice. Aquinas believes that no
further answer is possible. The choice doesn’t depend on something else,
it is oneself—it is the self-constitution of the person who seeks perfection
in this goal and not another. As David Burrell explains, “[T]he human self
becomes itself by acting in the way it does, and these ways come to stamp
an individual with his or her particular character.”152 The person one be-

150. Cf. ST I-II.13:3c, where Aquinas explains how the end in one operation can be a means
to bring about a further end.
151. ST I-II.6:2ad2.
152. David B. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1979), 128. There is no space here to discuss the huge topic of character in Aquinas.
It is enough to say that even though character (habitus) can become a principle of human ac-
tions (see ST I-II.49:3), it develops as a consequence of human actions (see ST I-II.51:2–3). There
238 = h u m a n f r e e d o m

comes through choosing this goal did not exist before the choice was made.
The human person is the one who creates oneself through seeking specific
goals. The choice itself is self-constituting. David Gallagher formulates this
in a startling way:
The judgment of choice which determines the will’s motion arises in the choice,
a choice which occurs only when it is willed. Hence the will influences, in the
act of choice, the very judgment it follows in that act.153

There is no actual circularity here, since choice is a single human act of

an individual person. In that one act, by means of two powers, we deter-
mine ourselves to a particular action and establish that one judgment of
the good (out of many possible judgments) is governing that action.154
It will help to recall once again the significance of Aquinas’s vocabu-
lary. Intellect and will are not detached, independent faculties that happen
to be associated with our being, like wristwatches or personal computers.
We are our understanding and willing.155 To ask the question “Who are
we?” is to ask what we understand, what we think, what we love, what we
live for. We identify with other things and are transformed by our personal
understanding of them (this is what it means to be an “intellectual” crea-
ture). We seek perfection by seeking what is good, by acting in the world,
by transforming ourselves and our world (this is what it means to be a
“willing” creature). This integrated process of understanding and willing is
our unfolding “self.”
This means, for Aquinas, that when we face a choice about goods and
ends, whether small or large, we face a choice about ourselves. Before the
moment of choice, our reason discovers that there are different ways of in-
terpreting the matter in hand, different ways of understanding the good,
all of which arise from the present reality of the world and of our self. So
our identity, which is formed by our understanding and by the goods we
seek, is in question. We are not sure who we are because we are not sure

is a feedback effect in which actions produce dispositions and dispositions produce actions. The
ultimate foundation of the process lies in the individual choices that produce action.
153. Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” 256.
154. Ibid., 276.
155. In a passage about how one can attribute the activity of parts of a substance to the ac-
tivity of the whole, Aquinas writes: “We may therefore say that the soul understands, just as
the eye sees; but it is more correct to say that the human being understands through the soul
[homo intelligat per animam]” (ST I.57:2ad2).
 f r e e d o m i n a q u i n a s = 239

how to understand or what to seek. Our reason has discovered that there
is no single objective way of understanding things, no single set of nec-
essary goals. We are paralyzed. Then, at the moment of choice, our will
approves of one specific way of understanding things by actually seeking
one specific good. The will as it brings about one possible way of under-
standing things constitutes the freedom of the acting person. We go beyond
the indeterminate world of possibility and create a single determined fu-
ture through action. So our identity, which is constituted in relation to the
goods that we actually seek, is established. We become sure of who we are
by crystallizing one way of understanding the world and our self, and ori-
entating our whole being to this good. We create ourselves by seeking this
form of perfection in this good.
So the undertaking of one project (understanding in this way, desir-
ing in this way, being this person) is the self. There is no other “self ” that
exists outside or before the willing of one goal, as its cause or explanation.
There is no “deep self ” that is a prior foundation for the choice we make
of one project from among many. We constitute ourselves through our
free choices. Our goals constitute our personhood, yet they are themselves
constituted by the person we choose to be. Even if we never reach the goal
in the future, an identity is still created in the present. What matters is the
direction in which we are actually moving and our personal understand-
ing of the significance of that direction. We are a longing, a direction, a
project—not a finished product. To be human is to be in via, to be on the
way. To be free is to choose the way, and in choosing the way, to choose the
end at which we hope to arrive.
 Part Four

H u ma n F u lf i llm e n t
 Chapter 7

T h e P o s s i b i l i t y o f H u m a n H a pp i n e s s
in Sartre

The Goal of Happiness

In the action theories of Sartre and Aquinas human beings are
creatures who seek particular concrete things: food, pleasure,
success, security, fame, friendship, etc. We are not disembodied
creatures who have some abstract notion of human fulfillment.
Desire takes us beyond who we are, in all its particularity, to the
person we hope to become, in all its particularity. Nevertheless,
both thinkers hold that within these concrete goals, or through
them, there is a more universal good that we are seeking. This
universal good is the fulfillment we find in achieving our goals,
whatever they may be. It is not another “greater” good to which
we direct our lives, it is the underlying fulfillment that we seek
as we seek concrete goods. It explains why we are motivated to
seek anything at all.
We desire a particular thing because we want to find fulfill-
ment in general in particular things. We have a general desire
for fulfillment that allows us to understand why we seek par-
ticular types of fulfillment. I will use the English word “hap-
piness” to refer to this general goal that lies at the heart of all
particular human seeking. There is some warrant for this in the
language of both the writers we are concerned with. Aquinas
calls the last end that motivates all desire beatitudo, which is

243
244 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

usually translated as “happiness.”1 Sartre writes that human reality is by

nature a conscience malheureuse, “an unhappy consciousness,” since we are
constantly frustrated in our desire to find fulfillment in a stable and freely
chosen identity.2 The suggestion, however slight, is that this fulfilled iden-
tity would be a state of happiness. I won’t pretend that “happiness” is a key
term for Sartre—as we shall see, he prefers the obscure neologism l’en-soi-
pour-soi. I simply want to have one English word to stand for this universal
goal that plays such a significant part in the philosophy of both thinkers.
The main question to ask here in part four is this: Given the understanding
of freedom discussed in the previous chapters, can we ever be happy?
The single most important difference between the philosophy of Aqui-
nas and that of Sartre is that Aquinas thinks that human beings can find
happiness and can rest in it and enjoy it. We are not perpetually dislocated
and permanently moving on. At the same time, Aquinas insists, just as Sar-
tre does, that finding perfect human happiness in this life is nevertheless
an impossible ideal. We should not therefore be too quick to conclude that
Aquinas’s views about happiness create a gulf between his thinking about
the nature of human life and Sartre’s. The impossibility of finding happi-
ness in this life is in fact a final idea that they share.
Before launching into the texts I want to remind the reader about a
point made in the preface. Aquinas is a theologian through and through.3
Yet he is also able to make philosophical arguments that make sense in
their own right without the need for theological convictions or faith in
revelation. His analyses of intellect and will, of human action, and of the
desire for happiness do not depend on faith in God. The argument about
happiness in the first questions of Part I-II is philosophical, even though
the conclusion is also a theological conviction that would stand without
the appeal to reason. So when Aquinas concludes that human beings can-

1. ST I.II.2:1c. See the translations in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers
of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1948) and
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Thomas Gilby, 60 vols. (London: Blackfriars/Eyre &
Spottiswoode, 1963ff) (which curiously uses “happiness” in the text and “beatitude” in some of
the headings).
2. BN 90; EN 127/134.
3. The Prologue to Part II, for example, sets the whole question of the nature of the human
being in a theological context: The human being “is made in God’s image” (factus ad imaginem
Dei), and Aquinas only treats of God’s image here because he has already spent the 119 ques-
tions of Part I treating, broadly speaking, of God himself.
 h ap p i n e s s i n s a r t r e = 245

not be perfectly happy in this life the impasse he reaches is philosophical,

just as Sartre’s is. When Aquinas goes on to argue that we must be able to
find happiness beyond this life in God, he is using the desire for happiness
as an argument to lead one to God (even though he already believes in
God). Aquinas does not use theology to plug a philosophical gap, he uses
philosophy to open up a theological horizon. At this level, he and Sartre
are doing the same kind of thinking.

The Ideal of Self-Coincidence

According to Sartre, there is a fundamental lack in human beings. We have
examined this lack in earlier chapters. Self-consciousness brings with it
a presence-to-self. At one and the same time we acknowledge our iden-
tity and perceive a distance from it. We try to resolve this constitutive ten-
sion by mapping out a meaningful future and projecting ourselves toward
a particular goal. In this way we freely establish an identity in relation to
this future through our actions.
The problem is that as soon as we reflect on this newly established iden-
tity, we dissociate ourselves from it and once again become caught in the
same trap. Ideally, we would like two things at the same time: (i) a secure
and stable identity, the satisfaction of our desires, a conclusion to our end-
less seeking; and (ii) the freedom and distance that come with self-con-
sciousness, the ability to choose our goals, the responsibility for founding
the identity that unfolds through our choices. In other words, we want to
be being-in-itself and being-for-itself at the same time, we want to be l’en-
soi-pour-soi, “in-itself-for-itself.”4 We seek a “failed synthesis of conscious-
ness and being.”5 This is an impossible ideal since being-for-itself is by def-
inition the surpassing of being-in-itself. We are always beyond what we
are and we never quite reach what we could be—there is always another
“horizon of possibilities.”6 The ideal totality is not just a factual impossibil-
ity but also a theoretical contradiction.
We are by nature restless, searching, inquisitive, unsettled, and yearn-
ing for more, and if we ever stopped wanting and wondering and look-
ing further we would stop being human. Human being-for-itself is the up-

4. BN 194; EN 230/244.
5. BN 626; EN 674/720, manquée can mean both “failed” and “missing.”
6. BN 101; EN 138/146.
246 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

surge of the negation of its being-in-itself. “What the for-itself lacks is the
self—or itself as in-itself [Ce que le pour-soi manque, c’est le soi—ou soi-
même comme en-soi].”7 Sartre’s anthropology flows out of his phenomenol-
ogy. To be human is to exist in-between two poles as a “lived relation [rap-
port vécu]”: these poles are the present facticity of being-in-itself and the
future ideal of the in-itself-for-itself. “Human beings are neither the one
nor the other of these beings, since there is no sense in which we are. We
are what we are not and we are not what we are.”8 In other words, it is a
constitutive part of our nature to consider and seek a perfection that we do
not yet have (“we are what we are not”), and it is a constitutive part of our
nature to be conscious of a lack of complete identification with who we are
now (“we are not what we are”).
Sartre writes about the ideal of self-coincidence in a number of ways.9 It
is “the impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself ” which would
“preserve within it the necessary translucency of consciousness along with
the coincidence with itself of being-in-itself.”10 He identifies the ideal with
value insofar as the values we seek are precisely things that do not exist,
things that define the persons we wish to become. Value is the “beyond”
that draws us out of ourselves toward a future self that does not exist.11 Sar-
tre writes about “value taken in its origin, or the supreme value,”12 which
bears a great similarity to the universal good in Aquinas. It is not the par-
ticular good sought but the good as good for us: the fact that a good allows
us to surpass ourselves and constitute ourselves in relation to a perfection
we have not yet achieved. The supreme value is the underlying fulfillment
of the self that we seek as we seek particular values, “the absolute being of
the self with its characteristics of identity, of purity, or permanence, etc.,
and as its own foundation.”13 Beauty represents for us this ideal state of ful-
fillment.14 Yet even beauty is apprehended only as an absence that haunts
the imperfection of the world. We can only realize the beautiful through
our imagination, which grasps the ideal but simultaneously recognizes the
unreality of what is imagined.
The ideal is “an unrealisable totality which haunts the for-itself and

7. BN 89; EN 125/132. 8. BN 575; EN 621/664.

9. See BN 101; EN 138/146. 10. BN 90; EN 126/133.
11. BN 92–95; EN 129–32/136–39. Cf. BN 194; EN 230/244.
12. BN 93; EN 130/137. 13. BN 93; EN 130/137.
14. BN 194–195; EN 230–31/244–45.
 h ap p i n e s s i n s a r t r e = 247

constitutes its very being as nothingness of being”; it is a “perpetually indi-

cated but impossible fusion of essence and existence.”15 If it were ever real-
ized the very structure of temporality would evaporate, and past, present,
and future would collapse into each other. What we fail to appreciate is that
the future we aim at is not just something we wish to make present. The fu-
ture as future always remains beyond us; it is what allows us to go beyond
ourselves, to think and act and exist as human beings. This future is never
realized. “What is realised is a for-itself which is designated by the future
and is constituted in connection with this future.”16 We know that the ideal
is unrealizable, yet at the same time we have to live as if we were in the pro-
cess of achieving it. It is not simply a regulative ideal that structures hu-
man behavior, it is a constitutive ideal that establishes human identity.
This begs the question of whether we can aim at an ideal even if we be-
lieve it can never be achieved. Aquinas, as we shall see later, believes that
our orientation to this final goal proves that it must exist. If we are consti-
tuted by something else, even by an ideal that seems unreachable within
the limitations of our present thinking, then it must (objectively) be pos-
sible, and we must (subjectively) act as if it were possible. Sartre, however,
accepts a lack of integration in his philosophy. On the one hand, he insists
that human beings continually have to live and act for a final goal beyond
the reality of their present circumstances. On the other hand, he argues
that this goal is a self-contradictory ideal. In other words, for Sartre, acting
human beings have to live as if the goal were possible and direct their prac-
tical thoughts to it, but their more reflective thinking reveals that the goal
is actually impossible.

Existential Denial and Human Relationships

There are many ways of trying to avoid these existential dilemmas, and they
all involve some kind of bad faith or self-deception, “la mauvaise foi.”17 We
looked in chapter 1, for example, at the attempt to be “sincere,” which oc-
curs when people deny their freedom and lose themselves in some partic-
ular identity or role.18 Ultimately these strategies all prove futile. Not even
death can provide a resolution.19 Death makes this synthesis impossible

15. BN 194; EN 230–31/244. 16. BN 128; EN 163/172.

17. BN 47–70; EN 81–106/85–110. 18. BN 58–67; EN 93–102/98–108.
19. BN 531–48; EN 576–92/615–33.
248 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

not simply because it is the end of consciousness and temporality—which

would be a fairly banal truth. It is the unpredictability of death that thwarts
us. This unpredictability makes it impossible for us to fix the significance
of all that we are striving to achieve because anything at all might be rein-
terpreted or undermined by a new future. If the future gives meaning to all
the past, and if our death cannot be chosen, then the ultimate meaning of
our whole life is beyond our control and outside the scope of our freedom.
The final term that would give meaning to all our waiting and striving is
on principle never given, as it is the ideal in-itself-for-itself.
If death is not the free determination of our being, it can not complete [ter-
miner] our life. One minute more or less may perhaps change everything, and if
this minute is added to or removed from my account, then even admitting that
I use it freely, the meaning of my life escapes me.20

In the play In Camera Garcin remarks, “I died too soon. I wasn’t al-
lowed time to carry out my acts.” To which Inès replies, “One always dies
too soon—or too late. And yet life is over with, finished; the deed is done
and you must add it all up. You are nothing other than your life.”21
Many aspects of the dilemma of ontological unhappiness are played
out in human relationships.22 “The look” (le regard) of “the other” (autrui)
confers on our being a kind of objectivity and allows us to observe our
freedom from the outside.23 “I see myself because somebody sees me.”24 In
the eyes of the other our projects and identities, which are so precarious,
take on a certain stability and seem like essential features of our being. Our
recognition of the subjectivity of the other gives us an unreflective experi-
ence of our own objectivity, and for a moment takes away the anguish of
having to go beyond what we are. Objectification in itself is not necessar-
ily negative, even though Sartre illustrates it by describing experiences of
shame (la honte).25 Shame can be an authentic attitude because it allows us
to apprehend our nature as an object.26 “Pride” (la fierté), however, is yet
another form of bad faith. In pride we resign ourselves to being only what
20. BN 538–39; EN 583/623.
21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos and Other Plays (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 221; origi-
nal French text in Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos (London: Routledge, 1987), 93.
22. See BN 252–302; EN 292–341/310–64. 23. BN 259–65; EN 298–304/316–23.
24. BN 260; EN 299/318.
25. See BN 221–23 and 259–61; EN 259–61/275–77 and 298–300/316–18.
26. BN 290; EN 330/351.
 h ap p i n e s s i n s a r t r e = 249

we are and take refuge from freedom in this objectified being.27 An au-
thentic response to shame is not pride but l’orgueil, which is perhaps best
translated as “assertiveness” rather than “arrogance” (or again “pride”),
since it means simply the reaffirmation of our freedom and the consequent
objectification of the other’s subjectivity.28
The two defining characteristics of human relationships emerge from
these primary phenomenological experiences. In Being and Nothingness the
words “amour” (love) and “le désir” (desire) are given technical meanings
that should be distinguished from their everyday ones. Through l’amour we
seek to become the object of the other’s freedom, so our freedom becomes
more and more alienated. This is why Sartre relates his concept of love to
masochism, because it holds a passive face to the subjectivity of the other.29
Through le désir we seek to turn the other into an object and to possess the
other’s freedom. This is why Sartre’s concept of desire is related to sadism,
because we use our own subjectivity to take hold of the other.30 Love allows
us to be appreciated for who we are—which limits our freedom; and desire
allows us to appreciate who the other person is—which restores our own
freedom, but restricts our ability to experience being loved. We oscillate be-
tween loving and desiring the other.
The failure to construct harmonious, stabilized relations, which is such
a notable feature of Sartre’s philosophy, is actually a guarantee that each
person in the relationship is free. If we love others as persons then there is
always the possibility that their freedom will take us by surprise. This cre-
ates conflict. We can appreciate whatever objective face they show in the
present, but this is quite different from objectifying them and denying that
they are free to change this face. The fact that others do not always fit with
our expectations is a sign that we are relating to their freedom as well as
to their identity. Conflict in a relationship is, for Sartre, a positive sign that
two people have not turned themselves or each other into objects that can
be possessed and manipulated.31 Just as we can never find perfect happi-
ness in a stabilized in-itself-for-itself, so we can never find perfect happi-
ness with another. The lack of perfect harmony in any human relationship
is, strangely, a sign that the relationship is still alive.32

27. BN 290; EN 330/351. 28. BN 290; EN 330/351.

29. BN 364–79; EN 404–19/432–47. 30. BN 379–412; EN 419–53/448–84.
31. See BN 361–415; EN 401–55/428–86.
32. It might be possible to construct an ethic of long-term commitment from the same
250 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

The Link between Ontology and Theology

Sartre puts the whole ontological dilemma in explicitly theological terms.33
Dieu, “God,” represents the ideal synthesis between being and conscious-
ness that we can never achieve.
Is not God a being who is what he is, in that he is all positivity and the founda-
tion of the world, and at the same time a being who is not what he is and who
is what he is not, in that he is self-consciousness and the necessary foundation
of himself?34

God is for Sartre the ideal of securely having an identity and freely found-
ing it at the same time. The fundamental project of human beings is to be
God. “To be human means to reach toward being God; or, if you prefer,
the human being fundamentally is the desire to be God.”35 We desire to be
“consciousness become substance, substance become the cause of self, the
Human-God [la conscience devenue substance, la substance devenue cause
de soi, l’Homme-Dieu].”36
Sartre adopts, for his own phenomenological purposes, the religious
vocabulary of the Judeo-Christian culture in which he stood. This tradi-
tion recognized the transcendent possibility of a being who can be both
perfectly free and perfectly fulfilled, beyond himself and in possession of
himself, ecstatic and recollected. At the same time Sartre insists that such
a being, in the terms of his phenomenological ontology, by definition can-
not exist. This is because consciousness and freedom are inextricably as-
sociated for Sartre with distance, negation, doubt, lack, and incompletion.
Consciousness always involves an openness to what one is not, an aware-

principles: No matter how strongly we love others, if we love them solely for who they are now,
this is an act of bad faith, since it restricts them to their present identity. If we love them as per-
sons we will love them for who they could be and not just for who they are, which is to love a
future self that could arise from the freedom of the one loved. Part of loving others in the pres-
ent is the desire to love whoever they will become through their free choices. So long-term
commitment to a relationship is not an additional factor we might give in the future but an es-
sential element of loving a person now in the present.
33. There is an excellent assessment of the relationship between Sartre’s theology and his
phenomenology by Frederick J. Crosson, “Intentionality and Atheism: Sartre and Maritain,”
The Modern Schoolman 64 (1987). See also James McLachlan, “The Theological Character of
Sartre’s Atheology in ‘Being and Nothingness,’ ” Epoche 5, nos. 1–2 (1997).
34. BN 90; EN 126/133. 35. BN 566; EN 612/654.
36. BN 575; EN 621/664.
 h ap p i n e s s i n s a r t r e = 251

ness of one’s own insufficiency, a projection beyond the present. It is a lack

of identity. If God were conscious, he would not be independent, self-
sufficient, and complete. The idea of completion is inseparable for Sartre
from the darkness and impenetrability of being-in-itself.
Sartre’s conceptions of being-in-itself and being-for-itself are inextrica-
bly associated in his phenomenological scheme with time. His reluctance
to engage in metaphysics meant that he could not allow himself to specu-
late about any alternative models of being that might make sense of an ex-
istence “outside” or “beyond” the limitations of time.37 He couldn’t postu-
late a scheme in which the freedom and distance of being-for-itself could
somehow exist “simultaneously” with the identity and positivity of being-
in-itself. So when he thought about a God whose existence might be one
with his essence, and about a human being who might be perfectly free
and perfectly happy, he rightly concluded that in the limited world of time
that we experience these notions are self-contradictory.38
Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found
being and by the same stroke to constitute the in-itself which escapes contin-
gency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God.
Thus the passion of the human being is the reverse of that of Christ, for we lose
ourselves as human beings in order that God may be born. But the idea of God
is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. The human being is a useless pas-
sion.39

If this seems like a rather depressing conclusion, we should remem-

ber that in the context of Sartre’s phenomenology it is the only one that
respects and preserves our distinctive “nature” as beings who go beyond
themselves. Sartre almost delights in the paradox that to be ourselves is to
wish we were not ourselves, that to be human is to be unsettled and un-

37. Note the brief foray into metaphysical speculation at BN 619–25; EN 667–73/713–20.
38. Frederick Crosson speculates about how Sartre’s view of consciousness might allow
for a conception of God in which he would know himself (and all things as they participate
in his infinite being) through a completely actualized and timeless self-consciousness, without
there being any duality or knowledge of himself as object. There could be some kind of self-
coincidence and completion that would not destroy consciousness. In other words, the ab-
sence of self-identity and substantiality which Sartre knows to be a condition of temporal hu-
man consciousness may not be a condition of all consciousnesses. See Crosson, “Intentionality
and Atheism: Sartre and Maritain,” 156–60.
39. BN 615; EN 662/708.
252 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

happy. “Human reality is suffering in its being” because “it could not attain
the in-itself without losing itself as for-itself.” It is therefore “by nature an
unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state
[par nature conscience malheureuse, sans dépassement possible de l’état de
malheur].”40 A “constant disappointment” accompanies every momentary
achievement. We ask ourselves “Is it only this? [n’est-ce que cela?]” and an-
other horizon of possibilities immediately opens out.41 The disillusion, we
should remember, is not connected with circumstances, it is an “ontologi-
cal disappointment.”42
Even a sympathetic critic like Frederick Olafson found these conclu-
sions too pessimistic and wished that Sartre had recognized that some hu-
man lives seem more disappointing and disappointed than others.
There is, after all, a distinction between lives that are crowned by achievement
and those that issue in frustration and failure, and this is a distinction that is
surely relevant to the business of making out—however difficult that may be—
whether a man is happy or not.43

I think that Olafson misses the point of Sartre’s argument. Sartre does
not deny that human beings can find some satisfaction in their achieve-
ments, nor does he deny that some lives are full of success and some full
of failure. He simply draws attention to the continual necessity of mov-
ing on. Any achievement becomes part of our facticity—we have to take
a view on it, interpret it, and project ourselves beyond it toward a future
goal. If we cling to it and define ourselves in terms of it, then it diminishes
our freedom and becomes an aspect of bad faith. Yet if we see beyond the
achievement (and admit that we are not yet fully happy), then the achieve-
ment becomes part of our unfolding identity and we preserve our freedom
and openness to the future. Unhappiness, as a manifestation of our con-
stant going beyond the present, is the guarantee that we are still conscious,
desiring human beings.44 There are less pessimistic ways of expressing the

40. BN 90; EN 126–27/134. 41. BN 101; EN 138/146.

42. BN 128; EN 163/173.
43. Frederick A. Olafson, Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism
(Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1967), 137.
44. This could perhaps provide a starting point for an existentialist ethics: the recognition
that human beings, as a fact of experience, are seeking a universally satisfying good. If we want
to seek perfect happiness (which we do), then it is self-defeating to be satisfied with anything
 h ap p i n e s s i n s a r t r e = 253

same convictions. It sounds much less dispiriting to say “there is always

more happiness awaiting us” or “we can always be even happier than we
are” than to say “we are never fully happy.” This is not just a rhetorical
trick, as long as we are clear that the restlessness in consideration is caused
by a lack of perfect happiness.

Failure and Hope

Existential failure is what saves us from the immobility and stagnation as-
sociated with success. Qui perd gagne: “Whoever loses wins.” This does not
mean that losing becomes another self-defeating form of success, it means
that the perpetual failure to fix our identity is the very thing that reassures
us of our freedom. This is a nonrecuperative ontology and Sartre persis-
tently refuses to allow that we can reach some synthesis just beyond the
contradictions of the human condition.45 To be human is to seek this syn-
thesis, it is not to reach it. By the same token, however, even our recurring
failure to reach this synthesis is provisional. Each failure becomes a fact of
experience that has to be surpassed. We have to seek further values and
project ourselves into a newly constituted future. This is why it’s inappro-
priate to think that Sartre’s ontology is pessimistic. If it is impossible for
human beings to find ultimate happiness in a perfect synthesis, it is equally
impossible for us to meet irrevocable failure in our projects. We always
have the chance, and indeed the necessity, of going beyond and building
something new.
Sartre’s critics broadly agree that human beings cannot find happiness
in his ontological scheme and that the in-itself-for-itself is an ideal that can
never be achieved. There is much more disagreement about whether or
not Sartre recommends an alternative approach to the human project that
could take us beyond this impasse. There are a few enigmatic references in
BN to a mode of living that might resolve the intractable problems raised
by Sartre’s ontology. Authenticity might allow a “recovery of being” (une

less than complete happiness. There is no need to argue that human beings should seek certain
goods, or should seek the good of others. Ethics simply needs to start with the nature of human
desire and human freedom.
45. See Christina Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 44–45 and 198–99; and Jean-Paul Sartre, Cahiers Pour Une Morale (Paris:
Gallimard, 1983), 450–53, translated as Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David
Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 435–39.
254 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

reprise de l’être) that would take us beyond the categories of good and bad
faith.46 A radical conversion might lead to “an ethics of deliverance and
salvation.”47 The activity of play releases us from the spirit of seriousness
and allows us to appreciate our own subjectivity.48 Through existential psy-
choanalysis our freedom might become more conscious of itself and might
be able “to take itself as a value as the source of all value.”49
There is no space here to dwell on these provocative suggestions,50 nor
to delve into the notebooks that represent Sartre’s own attempts to take
these issues forward and open up further avenues for exploration.51 I want
to make just one point here, which is that however much Sartre’s thought
develops in his later works, however much nuance he adds, he never puts
in question the essential conclusions of phenomenological ontology made
in Being and Nothingness.His enigmatic references to authenticity and con-
version do not represent a repudiation of the basic ontology of freedom
mapped out in Being and Nothingness.52 He continues to hold in his later
work that we are fundamentally incomplete beings. We have an identity
(as “being-in-itself ”); we are present to this identity and have to go beyond
46. BN 70, footnote 9; EN 106/110, footnote.
47. BN 412, footnote 14; EN 453/484, footnote. Cf. BN 627; EN 675/721.
48. BN 580–81; EN 626–27/669–70. 49. BN 627; EN 675/722.
50. For some helpful interpretations of what Sartre might have meant, see Francis Jean-
son, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans. Robert V. Stone (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1980), esp. 208–19; Hazel E. Barnes, An Existentialist Ethics (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1967), esp. 55; Juliette Simont, “Sartrean Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sar-
tre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 180–84; How-
ells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, esp. 24–25; David Detmer, Freedom as a Value: A Critique
of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1988), esp. 107–23; Thomas
W. Busch, “Sartre’s Use of the Reduction: Being and Nothingness Reconsidered,” in Jean-Paul
Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Frederick A.
Elliston (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980); and Thomas W. Busch, The Power
of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), esp. 30–39.
51. Sartre, Cahiers Pour Une Morale, translated as Notebooks for an Ethics. See Thomas C.
Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity (Chicago: Open Court,
1993).
52. Sartre himself famously referred to his work of 1943 as “une eidétique de la mauvaise
foi,” an eidetic or presentation of bad faith. He is not, however, rejecting the phenomenologi-
cal picture of the human being proposed in BN. The context of the phrase makes it clear that
he is comparing unfavourably his own theoretical and abstract phenomenology with Merleau-
Ponty’s more empirical studies of the concrete and often inhuman forces that actually shape
history. With hindsight he is criticizing his own analysis of the human situation for being de-
tached and insufficient, and not for being wrong. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IV (Paris:
Gallimard, 1964), 196 and footnote.
 h ap p i n e s s i n s a r t r e = 255

it (as “being-for-itself ”); and we seek a freely chosen future identity (in
“being-in-itself-for-itself ”).
Human beings cannot renounce this fundamental desire to be God, to
attain completion, without renouncing ourselves. We avoid this necessity
of going beyond ourselves and constituting ourselves in relation to an ideal
future. There may be additional attitudes we can adopt within this quest,
there may be further inferences we can draw from this quest, there may be
the possibility of turning the exercise of freedom into a goal, or of accept-
ing that the ultimate goal will never be reached—but Sartre never implies
that we can abandon this quest altogether. The refusal to rest satisfied, the
constant push beyond, over the horizon, is all that human beings can hope
for—at least by their own resources. Consciousness is not only conscious-
ness of not being what is present and having to be what is future (which is
where Sartre began), it is also consciousness of never being able to be this
future. This is the most profound sense of being human.
 Chapter 8

T h e P o s s i b i l i t y of H u m a n
H a ppi n e s s i n A q u i n a s

Different Kinds of Happiness

There are elements of Aquinas’s understanding of the human
being that could lead one to conclude that human fulfillment
in this life is an achievable goal. The good is not always beyond
us—sometimes it is present and possessed. Intellect and will,
for example, are not always restless and unsatisfied in Aquinas’s
scheme. Although the reason does advance from one piece of
understanding to the next, opening our soul up to further hori-
zons of being, the work of the intellect is “simply to apprehend
intelligible truth.”1 The movement of reason leads the intellect
to rest (quiescere) in the possessing (habere) of what is true.2
The will, likewise, is not just the faculty that takes us beyond
who we are through desire, it is also the faculty that allows us
to enjoy the good we have desired once we attain it. The will is
directed to the end even when it is present, and not just when it
is absent.3 Fruitio, “enjoyment,” is connected with “the delight
[delectationem] which one has in realizing the longed-for term,
which is the end.”4 The intellect perceives the good as agree-
able (perceptio convenientis), and the will finds complacentia in
it (“satisfaction” or “pleasure”).5

1. ST I.79:8c. 2. ST I.79:8c.
3. ST I-II.3:4c. 4. ST I-II.11:1c.
5. ST I-II.11:1ad3.

256
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 257

This notion of rest and enjoyment may seem to undermine the cen-
tral argument of this book. I have been suggesting that intellect and will
function for Aquinas in a similar way to Sartre’s consciousness and being-
for-itself. We are by nature open to what we are not (through intellect)
and striving to become what we are not (through will), and our identity as
human beings consists in a perpetual going-beyond ourselves toward an-
other identity that does not yet exist, toward our future perfection. When-
ever we seek a particular good, we are seeking our own good, which is pre-
cisely our being insofar as it does not yet exist.6 Even if the good we seek
is simply the preservation of what we already have (like health or friend-
ship), there is still a sense in which this preservation of our being in the fu-
ture is something we do not yet have, which is the very reason why we are
seeking it. Our being is necessarily fractured by the decentering that intel-
lect and will bring about.
If in fact we can reach this perfection and actually be happy with it, if
we can possess an identity without having any distance from it, if we can
halt this constant movement beyond, then the picture I have presented of
Aquinas’s human being is false. For Sartre, to be human is to go beyond
what we have and what we are. For Aquinas, it seems, we can at some point
rest content with what we have and what we are; in Sartre’s terms, we can
reach a state of becoming pure being-in-itself. Rest, possession, enjoyment,
satisfaction: these are concepts that would indicate to Sartre the dark night
of identity and the dissolution of consciousness. With these questions in
mind we can examine the extent to which Aquinas thinks that we can and
cannot be happy in this life.
Happiness, beatitudo, as we saw in chapter 6, is the satisfaction we
hope to find when we reach our final goal and attain the perfection we
have longed for. We can want many different things at the same time, large
and small, yet at any one moment there must be a deepest desire that moti-
vates us, an overriding goal that functions as an organizing principle to our
actions, one which we long for as our “perfect and fulfilling good [bonum
perfectum et completivum].” 7 Happiness is the perfect good, “which satis-

6. This is true even when our attention is directed away from ourselves to the good of oth-
er people or other things, since our desire is still personal and part of what we wish our own
life to be about. See the discussion of “the good” in chapter 2 above.
7. ST I-II.1:5c.
258 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

fies the appetite altogether, else it would not be the last end, if something
yet remained to be desired.”8 If we find the ultimate good we are seeking
and fulfill our desire, then we will be happy.
Aquinas makes three important distinctions as he writes about happi-
ness.9 The first, which we have already come across, is between the general
meaning of the last end (the ratio of the last end, the last end as such) and
the particular object we are seeking as our last end (“the thing in which
the last end is found [id in quo finis ultimi ratio invenitur]”).10 We all seek
our last end as such, we all want to be happy and to find fulfillment in our
perfect good. Yet we don’t all agree on how to be happy, on where we will
find that fulfillment. The second distinction is between beatitudo imper-
fecta and beatitudo perfecta.11 Imperfect or incomplete happiness is sim-
ply happiness to the extent that we can find it in this life: it is “that which
is had in this life [quae habetur in hac vita].” Perfect or complete happi-
ness “consists in the vision of God.”12 Only perfect happiness “attains to
the true notion of happiness,” while imperfect happiness “does not attain
thereto, but partakes of some particular likeness of happiness [participat
quandam particularem beatitudinis similitudinem].”13 The third distinction
is between possessing an end imperfectly, “only in intention,” and possess-
ing an end perfectly, “not only in intention but also in reality [in re].”14 The

8. ST I-II.2:8c.
9. For the historical background to Aquinas’s discussion of happiness and for an account
of some of the influences on him, see Georg Wieland, “Happiness: The Perfection of Man,” in
The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny,
and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
10. ST I-II.1:7c. See the discussion of the indetermination of ends in chapter 6 above.
11. The theological distinction goes back to William of Auxerre, died 1231; see Wieland,
“Happiness: The Perfection of Man,” 679. Aquinas uses it to develop some unresolved themes
in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where, for example, worldly happiness is subject to fortune,
and contemplation, although the best activity of the human being, is also something beyond
human attainment. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.:
Hackett, 1985), 10:7, 1177b26 to 1178a6; and Anthony Kenny, “Aquinas on Aristotelian Happi-
ness,” in Aquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honour of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Scott MacDon-
ald and Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 24. An-
thony Celano argues convincingly that in formalizing these distinctions Aquinas draws out the
implications of Aristotle’s ethics without betraying his thought; see Anthony J. Celano, “The
Concept of Worldly Beatitude in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy 25 (1987).
12. ST I-II.4:5c.
13. ST I-II.3:6c.
14. ST I-II.11:4c.
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 259

will can thus have a true but imperfect enjoyment of the last end even be-
fore it reaches it, through its active striving toward this goal.
Aquinas writes with great simplicity in ST I-II.5:3 that “perfect and true
happiness cannot be had in this life [perfecta autem et vera beatitudo non
potest haberi in hac vita].”15 This statement alone should puzzle us. On the
one hand, the whole point of human life is happiness. On the other hand,
Aquinas now insists, we can never find true happiness in this life. Aquinas
believes that human beings by their very nature cannot find perfect hap-
piness in this life—the “rest” we can achieve is never total. As bodily crea-
tures who exist in time and who have an infinite desire to understand and
be fulfilled, we can never find the final rest we are searching for in this life.
This is not because of some circumstantial difficulty or personal weakness,
it is because of our nature as temporal creatures with intellect and will.
Aquinas agrees with Sartre that the perfection human beings naturally de-
sire, being-in-itself-for-itself, is a self-contradictory synthesis that cannot
be attained in this life. Whether it is possible for us to attain another kind
of life, beyond time, is a separate question to which we will return later.

The Impossibility of Perfect Happiness in This Life

We can now look more closely at the texts that support this interpretation.
In ST I-II.5:3 Aquinas asks whether one can be happy in this life. Hap-
piness is the perfect and sufficient good that “excludes every ill and ful-
fils every desire.”16 He concludes that “in this life every ill cannot be ex-
cluded” and “the desire for good in this life cannot be satisfied.”17 These
are extraordinarily bold statements. Aquinas believes that human de-
sire, in this life, never ends. As long as we are living we are unsatisfied
with what we have. The desire for a good, as we saw in chapter 2, al-
ways reflects a desire to become what we are not, because in every good
we seek we are always seeking our own good, that is, the being that we
do not yet have.18 So Aquinas is arguing that as long as we are living we
are seeking to go beyond the present to a future perfection that we do
not yet possess. It is an essential part of our nature as creatures in time
to be incomplete and looking beyond. To be human is to lack the full-
ness of being that we could attain, which is to lack ourselves. Human be-

15. ST I-II.5:3c. 16. ST I-II.5:3c.

17. ST I-II.5:3c. 18. See ST I-II.18:1.
260 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

ings, as far as the life we know is concerned, are an essential insufficiency.

The examples given in ST I-II.5:3 may seem too weak to support these
sweeping ontological conclusions. Aquinas writes that this present life is
subject “to ignorance on the part of the intellect, to inordinate affection on
the part of the appetite, and to many penalties on the part of the body.”19
One could argue that these ills might be removed in a utopian society, at
least in theory. Yet for Aquinas they are identified with temporal, bodily
life as such, and not just with the shortcomings of a particular culture or
society. Ignorance, for example, is far more than the consequence of a bad
education. Aquinas demonstrates in ST I-II.3:8 that the human intellect has
a natural desire to know the causes of things. We wonder (admirari). This
desire cannot be fully satisfied until we know the first cause of all created
things through union with God. Even without the reference to God, Aqui-
nas is saying something quite radical about human desire. It is part of our
nature as intellectual creatures to question things, and as long as we are
alive we will be questioning things and seeking more fundamental expla-
nations, therefore our desire for understanding (and so for happiness) can
never be fully satisfied in this life. The intellect takes us beyond to what we
do not yet know, and there is no end to what we can discover. One proof of
the endlessness of human desire is thus our incessant curiosity.
Human longing concerns much more than the desire for understand-
ing. ST I-II.2 deals with a range of human goods that appear to promise
happiness, such as riches, honor, fame, power, etc. Hidden in one of the re-
plies Aquinas makes a kind of phenomenological observation that points
to a larger truth. In the desire for riches “and for whatsoever temporal
goods,” we find that “when we already possess them, we despise them, and
seek others.” This is because “we realise more their insufficiency when we
possess them [eorum insufficientia magis cognoscitur cum habentur], and
this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does
not consist therein.”20 Notice that this is not because some goods disap-
point us with their inferior quality, it is because all temporal goods, when
possessed, cause us to despise them and seek beyond them. We want to
leave, as it were, as soon as we have arrived. Whichever goods we seek in
time, the provisional happiness we might attain through them is always

19. ST I-II.5:3c, referring to Augustine’s De civitate dei, 19:4.

20. ST I-II.2:1ad3.
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 261

accompanied by a deepening appreciation of their insufficiency. However

great the good we achieve, however secure the happiness we find, it is al-
ways threatened by the possibility that we will move on and desire some-
thing else. We can never force ourselves to continue to want in the future
what we want in the present. To do so would be to abandon our freedom—
which is impossible as long as we are creatures of intellect and will living in
time. Aquinas’s point here is similar to Sartre’s when he describes anguish.
Our identity is never absolutely secure, and the most stable goals imagin-
able are always threatened, at least implicitly, by the possibility of appreci-
ating their insufficiency and freely choosing something else.
The more our desire is fulfilled, the greater our desire becomes, since it
inevitably carries us beyond the momentary fulfillment of the present to-
ward a deeper fulfillment. In the final article of this question about the na-
ture of the good that constitutes our happiness (ST I-II.2), Aquinas goes so
far as to say that the good of which we are capable is infinitum, “infinite.”
The good that intrinsically and inherently belongs to us in virtue of our ex-
istence is of course created and finite, since we are only creatures. But the
good to which we are open, “as an object” (of our intellect and will), is nev-
ertheless infinite.21 In other words, our understanding and desire are quite
literally without limits, never ending, infinite.
In a later article about enjoyment Aquinas admits that we find a kind
of temporary delight in reaching certain goals, but this is never perfect en-
joyment. He cites Augustine: “We enjoy what we know, when the delighted
will is at rest therein.”22 He then concludes that the will never rests com-
pletely (simpliciter) “save in the last end: for as long as something is waited
for, the movement of the will remains in suspense, although it has reached
something.”23 Aquinas thus believes that we must always be looking for
something in this life. Sartre has written that self-coincidence is impossi-
ble for human beings, because we can never catch up with the self we want
to become, there is always something else opening up ahead of us. Aqui-
nas agrees here that the desire to find rest and perfection necessarily brings
with it a movement beyond any fleeting rest we might find in the goods of
this world. There is a pleasing coincidence of language here. For Aquinas

21. ST I-II.2:8ad3.
22. ST I-II.11:3c, referring to De Trinitate, 10:10.
23. ST I-II.11:3c.
262 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

the movement of the will “remains in suspense [remanet in suspenso]” de-

spite the fact that it has found rest in a provisional object of delight.24 We
always desire more even though we have attained what we previously de-
sired. For Sartre it is the meaning of one’s past that is perpetually “in sus-
pense [en sursis],” because one’s future projects and desires may always put
the goals that one has already achieved into a new perspective.25 Being-
for-itself, like the will, must always go beyond the achievements of the past
and the present and reach toward a future goal.
Temporal goods are not only insufficient, they are also unstable. Aqui-
nas writes in ST I-II.5:3:
Human beings naturally desire the good, which they have, to be permanent.
Now the goods of the present life pass away, since life itself passes away, which
we naturally desire, and would wish to endure unceasingly, for we naturally
shrink from death. Wherefore it is impossible to have true happiness in this
life.26

This is an uncontroversial but nevertheless shattering point. Everything we

attain will pass. It is not just the fact that particular goods may be lost, it is
the deeper principle that all goods will be lost, and all meaning and hap-
piness will thus be undermined. We cannot hold on to anything. There is
no point in trying to suggest that we are indifferent to this loss. The start-
ing point of Aquinas’s anthropology is that human beings are seeking their
own fulfillment through the pursuit of particular goods. It is our nature to
seek happiness. Now we find that we will ultimately be denied happiness
by the transitory nature of life as a whole and of all the particular goods of
life. Aquinas returns to this need for stability in the following article.
Now human beings naturally desire to hold onto the good that they have, and to
gain the security of holding onto it, else they must of necessity be afflicted with
the fear of losing it, or with the sorrow of being certain to lose it. Therefore it is
necessary for true happiness that human beings have the opinion of never los-
ing the good that they have.27

24. ST I-II.11:3c.
25. BN 501, see 501–4; EN 546/582, see 546–49/582–85.
26. ST I-II.5:3c.
27. ST I-II.5:4c.
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 263

This lack of stability, and the anxiety that follows with it, are a necessary
part of temporal existence. Aquinas writes that vicissitudes such as these
are “for such things as are subject to time and movement.”28
Even if we could somehow reach an infinite good in this life, and pos-
sess it without fear of ever losing it, there is still a final reason why perfect
happiness would be beyond us. Aquinas writes in ST I-II.3:2 that insofar
as happiness is a created reality in us it must involve our own activity (op-
eratio). Happiness, in other words, is not just something that happens to
us. Part of our fulfillment is to be actively involved in that fulfillment.29 It
is not enough for us to be alive, we want to be actively living.30 But in this
present life human activity can never be unified or continual.31 We have to
act in time, in the present, moment by moment, and therefore our activity
is necessarily fragmented. Although contemplation of the truth is an ac-
tivity that has more unity than an active life occupied with many things,
Aquinas is realistic about the fact that even this has to be interrupted by
sleeping and doing other things. So we can never act now in a way that en-
sures that all our future activity will be part of (or even consistent with)
this present act. We cannot collapse the future into the present and take
possession of a total, everlasting happiness. This is another example of how
our failure to be happy relates to our nature and not to certain unfortu-
nate circumstances. We are beings who operate progressively in time, and
we cannot unify this activity and bring it to completion in one integrated
movement.
For the many reasons outlined in this section, Aquinas is convinced
that human beings cannot find perfect happiness in this life. We should
not lose sight of the force of this conclusion. Aquinas does not say that per-
fect happiness in this life is a difficult achievement, one that is too much
for us in practice, and that we therefore need God’s help to find it. Instead
he says that perfect happiness in this life is in principle an impossible idea.
It would contradict our very nature to find perfect happiness. Human life
itself is fragmented and we have only a precarious hold on ourselves. We
are temporal creatures whose nature is to look beyond the present to the

28. ST I-II.5:4c.
29. ST I-II.3:2c.
30. Life involves the being of the living thing (esse viventis) and also the activity of the liv-
ing thing (operatio viventis); see ST I-II.3:2ad1.
31. ST I-II.3:2ad4.
264 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

future, to the good we do not yet possess, to the person we have not yet
become. Human beings in time are always seeking a further good. Aqui-
nas is absolutely insistent on this point. The temporal goods we seek are
necessarily insufficient and necessarily unstable. We have an infinite and
therefore insatiable desire to have more and to know more, and we know
that everything we do lay hold of will eventually pass. Aquinas has no con-
ception of what it might be like for human beings to achieve their perfec-
tion in this life. A perfectly happy human being could bear no resemblance
to the human beings that we know. Temporal human perfection is self-
contradictory because it would mean that we had finally become all that
we could be, which would be a kind of not-being-human. Aquinas be-
lieves, for the same reasons as Sartre, that perfect human happiness is im-
possible in this life because it would mean the end and not the fulfillment
of the human life that we know.

The Possibility of Perfect Happiness in God

Perfect happiness, according to Sartre and Aquinas, cannot be found in
this life. Aquinas, as part of his broad theological project, gives philosophi-
cal reasons for this, as we have already noted. These reasons flow from a
rationally argued account of human nature. By observing human life, by
analyzing the nature of intellect and will, Aquinas arrives at the same phil-
osophical impasse as Sartre. We want to be perfectly happy, and we realize
that we can never be perfectly happy in this life, so our existence is played
out in this uncertain space between desire and frustration, between pos-
sibility and failure, between hope and despair. In Sartre’s language, we are
caught between the necessity of being-for-itself and the impossibility of
being-in-itself-for-itself. Sartre cannot see any further. Aquinas, however,
does see further, and states that despite the fact that human beings cannot
find perfect happiness in this life it must still be possible for them to find
perfect happiness. This seems like a contradiction, and we now need to ex-
plore why for Aquinas it is not.
For Aquinas, as for Sartre, “happiness is the perfect good, which lulls
the appetite altogether, else it would not be the last end, if something yet
remained to be desired.”32 We are characterized by our ability to under-
stand all that is true and to desire all that is good. We are capable of an in-

32. ST I-II.2:8c.
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 265

finite good.33 The universal good, however, that alone can satisfy our will,
is not just a theoretical synthesis for Aquinas, it must also be a real possi-
bility, and he argues from the nature of our desire for the universal good to
the possibility of our finding it. In Aquinas’s understanding, it makes per-
fect sense to say that the existence of a desire or capacity is enough to es-
tablish that the desire or capacity could in principle be fulfilled (although
it may in the circumstances not be fulfilled). Similarly, the existence of
any potentiality is enough to establish that the potentiality could in prin-
ciple be actualized (although it may in the circumstances not be actual-
ized). Desire and potentiality are by definition aspects of a thing insofar
as it relates to the fullness of being it could have. They signify a relation-
ship with the perfection that is due to, appropriate to, and possible for this
being.34 This is the metaphysical background that allows Aquinas to state
with great simplicity:
Happiness is called the attainment of the perfect good. Whoever, therefore, is
capable of the perfect good can attain happiness. Now, that human beings are
capable of the perfect good, is proved both because their intellect can appre-
hend the universal and perfect good, and because their will can desire it. And
therefore human beings can attain happiness.35

It is an Aristotelian philosophy of nature and not just a Judeo-Christian

theology of creation that makes Aquinas think that happiness must be pos-
sible for the simple reason that we are creatures who want to be happy. To
say that a desire cannot in principle be fulfilled is to say that it is not really
a desire at all. Appetite (whether that of inanimate objects, plants, animals,
or rational creatures) is an orientation to what can fulfill, it is a movement
toward a good that perfects. There is a necessary correlation between the
subject who desires and the desired state of fulfillment. Without this corre-
lation it makes no sense to say that the subject is inclined to anything.
So there is no such thing as a natural desire that cannot in principle
be fulfilled. This is why Aquinas can argue in ST I.12:1 that a created in-
tellect must be able to see the divine essence, since otherwise “the natural
desire [to know the first cause of things] would remain in vain [remanebit

33. ST I-II.2:8ad3.
34. Cf. ST I-II.18:1c, where some things are said to lack the fullness of being “due to them”
(eis debitam).
35. ST I-II.5:1c.
266 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

inane].”36 It is true that he first gives a theological reason for this, and states
bluntly that it is “opposed to the faith” to suppose that the created intel-
lect cannot find happiness in the vision of God, or can find it in something
else.37 Yet we should note that the argument from natural desire is explic-
itly given as an additional nontheological reason for thinking that the cre-
ated intellect can see the essence of God.38
Aquinas makes a similar argument in the body of ST I-II.3:8, this time
without the appeal to faith. He writes that our curious intellects, which
wonder incessantly about causes, cannot be satisfied with knowing that
God exists as First Cause, since we want to know what he is and reach “the
very essence of the first cause.”39 Final and perfect happiness must there-
fore consist in nothing less than the vision of the Divine Essence.
Aquinas thus shows not only that we are capable of perfect happiness
but that we can find this in God alone. Once again, I want to insist that
there is a philosophical argument here that makes sense without the sup-
port of faith or religious revelation. Of course Aquinas never steps out-
side of the theological framework of the Summa, and he draws continually
on biblical and theological resources. But he also recognizes that a philo-
sophical investigation into the nature of human longing would necessar-
ily lead one to the idea of God. God is the universal good and the First
Cause of all things who must exist if our infinite desire for happiness and
for understanding are not to be in vain. Human desire necessarily points
to God. Right at the beginning of the Summa Aquinas writes that we can
be brought to an initial, imprecise conception of God by reflecting on the
nature of human desire:
To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by na-
ture, inasmuch as God is the happiness of human beings. For we naturally desire
happiness, and what is naturally desired by us must be naturally known to us.
This, however, is not simply speaking to know that God exists [non est simplic-
iter cognoscere Deum esse], just as to know that someone is approaching is not
the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is ap-
proaching; for many there are who imagine that our perfect good which is happi-
ness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else.40

36. ST I.12:1c. 37. ST I.12:1c.

38. To argue otherwise “is also against reason.”; ST I.12:1c.
39. ST I-II.3:8c. 40. ST I.2:1ad1.
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 267

God is the universal good, the possibility of perfect happiness, which we

have to believe in somehow if we are seeking our own happiness. To deny
this is to deny the nature of human willing, which always seeks beyond
to a more complete, a more perfect goal. “Our last end is the uncreated
good, namely, God, who alone by his infinite goodness can perfectly sat-
isfy our will [qui solus sua infinita bonitate potest voluntatem hominis per-
fecte implere].”41

Sartre’s Theological Pessimism

So for Aquinas willing happiness and thinking (at least implicitly) that God
exists (as the universal good) are inseparable. Sartre accepts this, insofar as
he accepts that being-for-itself has to seek completion in a God-like state
of being-in-itself-for-itself.42 He acknowledges that we cannot be free un-
less we act as if the possibility of perfect happiness lies ahead of us. “Value”
is this future ideal that cannot be renounced in the practical sphere. Yet by
insisting that this ideal is a self-contradiction Sartre resigned himself to a
different kind of contradiction—a contradiction between what we might
call practical thinking and philosophical thinking. He implies that in the
very moment of acting we have to believe that we are actually seeking a fi-
nal fulfillment that is achievable, yet in our phenomenological reflections
we have to conclude that this fulfillment is impossible. We act on the basis
of one thought that contradicts with another thought.43
41. ST I-II.3:1c.
42. It is important to recognize that Sartre has different ideas in mind when he refers to
“God.” There is God as symbol of an impossible human fulfillment, which concerns us here. See,
for example, BN 90; EN 126/133 and the section “The Ideal of Self-Coincidence” in chapter 7
above. There is also God as external lawgiver who imposes values on human beings and thus
takes away their freedom. See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1996), 73–78, translated as Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” in Jean-
Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London: Routledge, 2001), 44–46. Of this sec-
ond idea, as present in Existentialism and Humanism, Terry Keefe writes: “One does not have
to be religious to see how ill-founded is his implication that belief in the existence of God is
incompatible with the belief that man is what he makes of himself. It is no surprise that Chris-
tian critics have sometimes argued that the God that Sartre rejects in L’Existentialisme bears
little resemblance to the God of Christianity” (Terry Keefe, “Sartre’s L’Existentialisme Est Un
Humanisme,” in Critical Essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Robert Wilcocks [Boston: G. K. Hall &
Co., 1988], 90).
43. This question obviously connects with broader post-Nietzschean attempts to keep a
regulative ideal fixed in the space formerly occupied by God, while rejecting the need to hold
onto the reality of such an ideal. A psychological or cultural symbol thus preserves its function
without preserving its reality, like the grin that remains once Alice’s Cheshire cat has all but
268 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

Gianfranco Basti is sympathetic to Sartre’s contention that ultimate ful-

fillment is contradictory and impossible in this life. He argues that Sartre
should have recognized, as Aquinas did, that freedom depends on postulat-
ing the existence of a final goal beyond the limitations and contradictions of
this life.44 This is true even if we are not sure what form that final goal will
take or how such a final goal can be possible. Freedom is not possible if we
really think that the ultimate goal (being-in-itself-for-itself) is by its very
nature an impossible contradiction. It is not enough to argue that this final
goal is merely a symbol or a regulative ideal, as if we could acknowledge its
symbolic value and at the same time deny that its achievement could be a
real possibility. A practical goal, by its very nature, is more than symbolic.
It is only a goal, an end for our action, if we are actively seeking to achieve
it; and we can only act for something if we believe that it can be achieved. A
goal cannot regulate a human action as an ideal if the agent does not believe
that it is a real possibility, and an agent would stop acting straight away if it
were actually shown that the goal could not be achieved.
So if we are to be free we have to believe that there is some kind of
transcendent goal beyond everything we can conceive, beyond even the
contradictions our philosophy seems to have arrived at. This is not a move
against reason—it is accepting the limits of reason in order to save the rea-
sonableness of freedom. We have to believe that God exists as the ultimate,
transcendent goal of all our seeking even though we have not worked out
exactly what it means for God to exist or exactly how we can be fulfilled
in God. We thus recognize, as Aquinas has said in the passage cited above,
that God exists “in a general and confused way.”45 In other words “God”
(our perfect good, our final end, as a real possibility) is an existential con-
dition of the exercise of human freedom.

disappeared. The problem is not so much the contradiction; indeed, the postmodern instinct
is to rejoice in such contradictions. The real problem is that this account does not do justice
to the existential experience. Our actions betray our deepest understanding of what is real and
what we understand to be actually possible. We act not just “as if ” the ideal were achievable.
We act, instead, for or toward an ideal; thoroughly committed to achieving it; orienting our
minds, our bodies, our plans, our energies, our whole lives around this ideal. It is not enough
to insist that we don’t “really” believe in it when everything connected with our own reality is
constituted by it.
44. Gianfranco Basti, Filosofia Dell’uomo (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1995),
293–96.
45. ST I.2:1ad1.
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 269

Sartre admits that in order to be free we have to avoid “seriousness”

and accept that we will never find ultimate meaning in this present life.
Basti and Aquinas take this a step further and argue that in order to be
free we have to think that we can somehow find ultimate meaning beyond
this present life in God. God may be First Cause of our being, yet it is just
as important to recognize that he is the ultimate goal or final cause of our
existing. Sartre says that we have an existential goal that cannot actually
exist. He could instead have said that we have an existential goal without
understanding how it can exist. This would have resolved a contradiction
in his thought without undermining his well-founded conviction that the
idea of achieving perfect happiness in this life is self-contradictory.
Aquinas would accept Sartre’s basic ontological scheme. In this scheme
human beings are constitutively orientated to the beyond, to the future.
We have an inexhaustible desire for good, an unquenchable longing for
truth, an identity that is essentially open-ended. Knowing this, we have
to accept that nothing in this life will make us completely happy. There
are more positive ways of saying this, but they amount to the same thing:
We have to accept that we could always be even happier. It is not a ques-
tion of giving up the search for happiness, but of refusing ever to give up
on the search for happiness, even when we are tempted to think we have
found it.46 However we phrase it, we have to accept the limitations of hap-
piness in this life, and this means not choosing a final goal that is within
this life. Anything else would trap us in a limited identity and be an act of
bad faith—it would suggest that our life could be complete, and our free-
dom ended, if only this goal could be achieved.
Aquinas would then try and push Sartre to accept the consequences of
this ontological scheme. He would argue that our continual openness to
the future is a condition of freedom even at the moment of death, which
means that when we are dying we have to act as if there is a point to our life
beyond death. This is not about religious “faith,” it is about the phenome-

46. This refusal might also provide a “reason” for changing projects, for conversion, which
was so lacking in chapter 5 because of the incommensurability of alternative projects. If we rec-
ognize that our desire is always to go further than the present goal we have set ourselves, then
this will give us a reason for choosing a new goal if it has more and richer possibilities. The
only bad choice, the only “sin,” is not wanting to be happy enough, or not wanting enough to be
happy. It is resigning ourselves to a limited good, a limited vision of the self, when a greater
good beckons.
270 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

nology of freedom. Human beings do seek meaning, we do make sense of

our life by projecting ourselves beyond the present—whether we “believe”
that there is something beyond or not. It is a necessary part of freedom
that we orientate our lives to a life beyond the present, which means that
at the moment of death we must orientate our lives to a life beyond death,
even if we are skeptical about what this can possibly mean.
The human world only makes sense if there is something beyond the
totality of the world, and we cannot avoid acting as if death is not the fi-
nal end of human life. This kind of “faith” arises naturally from the struc-
ture of human freedom. The unavoidable search for human meaning and
happiness requires us to believe in something beyond the boundaries of
this life. This does not mean that reason depends on religion, or philoso-
phy on theology—it means that an essential aspect of reason and philoso-
phy is an openness to what is beyond comprehension, beyond the world,
and beyond death. If we are free, which we are, we inevitably seek what is
beyond, even when we are at the limits of our ability to conceive what that
beyond might be. In one very specific sense of the word, we cannot be free
unless we seek “God,” unless we recognize that we are seeking a supreme
good beyond the limitations of all the contingent and temporal goods that
we can recognize at present. There is a necessary openness and incomple-
tion to human life. It is a paradox that our desire is not free if it seeks to
find perfect satisfaction in anything in this life. If we seek happiness, which
we do, Aquinas argues that we have to seek God.

A Natural Desire That Cannot Be Fulfilled Naturally

The purpose of this book has been to explore the nature of human free-
dom. This exploration has brought us to the brink of a philosophical the-
ology, as we realize that human beings seek a happiness that can in princi-
ple never be found within this life. Aquinas suggests that perfect happiness
can, nevertheless, be found, and it can be found only in God. Without en-
tering too deeply into these theological aspects of Aquinas’s anthropology,
I simply want to make it clear that he is not sidestepping the very difficul-
ties he has established. Aquinas continues to believe that perfect happiness
with God is impossible for us to achieve in this life and is impossible for us
to achieve in our own natural state by our own natural powers. The funda-
mental philosophical dilemma about human happiness remains for Aqui-
nas even when God is present. Aquinas writes that the vision of the Divine
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 271

Essence “surpasses the nature not only of human beings, but also of ev-
ery creature” and “neither human beings, nor any creature, can attain final
happiness by their natural powers.”47 “It is impossible that it be bestowed
through the action of any creature: but by God’s work alone is the human
being made happy [homo beatus fit solo Deo agente], if we speak of perfect
Happiness.”48
Aquinas states two conclusions with absolute clarity, and he is able to
reach these conclusions without appealing to revelation (even though at
various points he also draws on revelation): (i) Human beings, by their
very nature as creatures of intellect and will, desire a perfect happiness that
cannot be found in this life. This perfect happiness can only be found in
union with God, since there is no end to our seeking in this life, and God
alone is the universal good that can entirely satisfy our will.49 (ii) Union
with God, the vision of God’s essence, surpasses the very nature of every
creature including the human being. All creaturely knowledge falls short
of the vision of the Divine Essence, “which infinitely surpasses all created
substance. Consequently neither human beings, nor any creatures, can at-
tain final happiness by their natural powers.”50
These two conclusions create a paradox. The perfect and crowning
good, to which we naturally tend, cannot be reached naturally. The vision
of the Divine Essence, which is absolutely necessary if we are to be happy,
is beyond our natural powers. Put very simply: we have a natural desire
for God that cannot be naturally fulfilled. This is no stranger than Sartre
writing that the goal we all strive toward (being-in-itself-for-itself) is at
the same time an impossible ideal, one that is by definition unachievable
because it would involve the dissolution of consciousness and being-for-
itself.
Denis Bradley gives a very helpful account of Aquinas’s position in his
book Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good, drawing on texts beyond the
few we have been looking at in ST I-II. Bradley writes that the thrust of
Aquinas’s philosophical thinking about “the natural endlessness of human
nature” leads to an aporia. As philosophy, it cannot rest satisfied with the
idea that human nature can find some natural fulfillment in this life, yet as

47. ST I-II.5:5c, referring to ST I.12:4. 48. ST I-II.5:6c.

49. Cf. ST I-II.2:8 and I-II.3:8.
50. ST I-II.5:5c. Cf. I.12:4.
272 = h u m a n f u l f i l l m e n t

philosophy it cannot “go forward to a theological affirmation of man’s su-

pernatural end.”51 Bradley believes that in Aquinas’s view reason, without
the aid of faith and revelation, can come to two conclusions that seem to
be at odds with each other: (A) that “human nature is forever unsatisfied
unless man attains the vision of God” and (B) that the “attainment of this
knowledge must be considered a supernatural achievement that is beyond
any merely human activity.”52
I will not go into all the questions generated by these paradoxical con-
clusions—they have been fiercely debated through the centuries.53 I just
want to point out how tempting it is to dissolve the paradox in one of two
ways. (i) One could insist that if we have a natural desire for God, then it
must be possible for it to be fulfilled naturally. This would be a purely natu-
ral theology and it would do away with the need for God’s “supernatural”
help.54 (ii) Conversely, one could insist that if the fulfillment of our desire
for God is beyond our natural powers, then we cannot naturally desire it.
This second type of thinking could go in one of two directions. It could
lead one to conclude that some human beings do not desire God (if they
do not receive his supernatural help), or it could lead one to conclude that
all human beings desire God (in which case this desire must be a “super-
natural” gift laid on top of their human nature).
Aquinas does not give in to these temptations. He holds fast to the fact
that we naturally desire what we cannot naturally attain. He does, however,
go a step further, and ask whether there may be another way of finding the
happiness that we cannot achieve by nature, a way that is natural to us but
that does not depend on our nature for its fulfillment. He goes beyond the
paradox without dissolving it:

51. Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happi-
ness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,
1997), xiii.
52. Ibid., 514.
53. Recent debate was provoked by the publication of Henri De Lubac, Surnaturel: Études
Historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946). For an excellent discussion of some contemporary views, see
Benedict M. Ashley, “What Is the End of the Human Person? The Vision of God and Integral
Human Fulfillment,” in Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and
Elizabeth Anscombe, ed. Luke Gormally (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994).
54. In Scholastic philosophy and theology “supernatural” simply means what is above or
beyond nature, what is beyond the unaided powers of any creature—it has nothing to do with
spooks or spells (which, as created things, might be quite “natural”).
 h ap p i n e s s i n a q u i n a s = 273
Just as nature does not fail human beings [referring to homo] in things that are
necessary, although it has not provided them with weapons and clothing, as it
provided other animals, because it gave them reason and hands, with which
they are able to get these things for themselves; so neither did it fail human
beings in things that are necessary, although it did not give them the means
by which they could attain happiness [quamvis non daret sibi aliquod princi-
pium quo posset beatitudinem consequi]: since this is impossible. But it did give
them freedom, with which they can turn to God, so that he may make them
happy [Sed dedit ei liberum arbitrium, quo possit converti ad Deum, qui eum fac-
eret beatum]. “For what we are enabled to do by our friends, we ourselves, in a
sense, are able to do,” as it is said in Ethics 3.55

So it is our part of our nature not only to seek happiness but also to have
the ability to ask for what we cannot find through our own efforts. It is part
of our nature not only to be frustrated but to find a way out of our frustra-
tion. The fact that the achievement of happiness can only be a supernatural
gift from God does not mean that our desire or request for it needs some
supernatural cause. We can ask God to allow us to share in this way of life,
and perhaps he will grant it to us.

55. ST I-II.5:5ad1, citing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 3:3, 1112b27. For an English version,
see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 63.
C o n c l u s io n

There are a number of ways of characterizing the shifts in hu-

man sensibility and self-understanding that have occurred in
the West in the modern period. In his much-discussed book
Sources of the Self Charles Taylor argues that in our late mod-
ern or postmodern era we are unable to justify the constitutive
goods we seek because we have lost an ability to trust in the es-
tablished moral orders that founded them in the first place.1
The extended self of the premodern period (a self that is de-
fined by its place in an external web of belonging and inter-
dependence), which became the nuclear self of the modern
period (a subject at the center of its own experiences, both ra-
tional and affective, without any constitutive relations to any-
thing else), is now losing confidence in its own integrity and
fragmenting into any number of changing and ill-defined iden-
tities: the decentered self of postmodernism. Cosmic metanar-
ratives are viewed with suspicion. We are like Buzz Lightyear
in the Pixar film Toy Story, who discovers that he is not a space
ranger on an intergalactic mission to destroy the evil emperor
Zurg, but is just a toy.2 In fact we fare much worse than Buzz,
since being a toy brings with it at least a sense of identity and
purpose, and a place in an alternative order. We have forsaken
the hope of ever finding such an order again.
Taylor believes that the modern period has engendered two
predominant and seemingly incompatible approaches to moral
reflection. One approach exalts the virtues of disengaged rea-
son: it is the moral force behind the modern scientific quest; it

1. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. 495–521. See also Taylor’s
The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
2. This is my analogy and not Taylor’s.

275
276 = c o n c l u s i o n

gives rise to a utilitarian approach to ethics; it tends to depersonalize hu-

man choices and create abstract and universally applicable moral norms.
The other approach grows out of the Romantic protest against this scien-
tific worldview: it emphasizes the more subjective goods of self-expression
and self-fulfillment; it pits the personal against the institutional and social;
it risks reducing all questions of value to questions of personal feeling.
In Taylor’s view there are two particular challenges facing us in our
own times. One is to recognize that both these approaches involve a search
for genuine goods that need to be understood on their own terms. There
are ideals at work here that we should respect and value. The modern pe-
riod is not simply one of moral decline; and the collapse of the old cos-
mic orders has brought some gains. The other challenge, however, is to re-
discover some richer moral sources, without undermining the gains that
modernity has brought to our sense of self. Taylor worries that we are liv-
ing beyond our moral means. He longs to reestablish some connection be-
tween the personal and the cosmic, a connection that would provide some
foundation for our high moral convictions. The modern self, whether sci-
entific or romantic, is inward looking and largely incapable of placing it-
self within a set of obligations or purposes that might give it a meaning
beyond that which it has determined for itself. Taylor is preoccupied with
“the search for moral sources outside the subject through languages which
resonate within him or her, the grasping of an order which is inseparably
indexed to a personal vision.”3
I mention this analysis not because Taylor is particularly interested in
Aquinas or Sartre, but because his articulation of the impasse reached by
modernity helps us to see that the Thomistic and Sartrean questions ex-
amined in this present work are not just of historical interest—they throw
light on these contemporary questions. This relatively recent conflict be-
tween disengaged reason and Romantic self-expression connects us with
more perennial philosophical questions. It is essentially about the relation-
ship between objectivity and subjectivity; between the true and the good;
between the world and the self; between knowledge and desire; between
necessity and freedom; between the scientific and the aesthetic; between
human conditioning and human independence; between our immersion
in this world and our longing for a form of existence beyond the boundar-

3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 510.

 c o n c l u s i o n = 277

ies of this world. These are some of the issues that Aquinas and Sartre are
grappling with. They both argue, in answer to Charles Taylor, that it is pos-
sible to take one’s place in a public moral order without self-alienation as
long as there is a personal appropriation of that order; that a proper objec-
tivity can be discovered only through a creative subjective commitment;
that personal freedom requires a recognition and acceptance of the cir-
cumstances that condition one; that one’s identity is both inherited and
chosen, formed and fluid, open to fulfillment and haunted by the threat of
disintegration.
The main aim of this study has been to show that despite their signif-
icant differences there are profound similarities in the way Aquinas and
Sartre understand the questions of human freedom, personal identity, and
the possibility of perfect happiness in this life—similarities that are unac-
knowledged or assumed to be nonexistent by most scholars. I hope I have
achieved this aim to some degree, and established that there is a common
approach to the way in which these questions are framed and answered.
A secondary aim of this study, often more implicit than explicit, has been
to show that there is much value in this common Thomistic-Sartrean ap-
proach, and that it sheds a great deal of light on some of the philosophical
issues facing us today.
For just a moment I want to set aside their differences, and present
a view of what it means to be a human being as if it came from a single
Thomistic-Sartrean pen, a view that has emerged from the four parts of
this study. This will act both as a conclusion to my study and as an invita-
tion to consider the implications of this vision of the human being.
In part one, it became clear that human beings both have an iden-
tity and go beyond it. We identify with our thoughts and feelings and val-
ues, with our circumstances, with the totality of our experience. There is
an immediacy about our presence to the world. We share in the being of
other things. Yet at the same time we are conscious of this experience and
are therefore distant from it. We are aware of our own incompletion. We
have questions, dilemmas, and moments of existential and moral anguish.
Nothing can completely determine for us the meaning of the world or the
direction of our life.
There is a fundamental lack within the present that paralyzes our
thought and action. We have to go beyond all that we are and conceive
of a future that will make sense of the present. We have to act for an end
278 = c o n c l u s i o n

that does not yet exist and orientate ourselves to this goal. In this way we
make sense of the world and give meaning to our life. The human person
is neither the present static identity nor the intangible future goal. We are
constituted, rather, by this freely chosen relationship between identity and
end. Personhood, therefore, necessarily involves both the facts that deter-
mine us and the movement beyond these facts to the one we seek to be-
come. It involves essence and existence, self-possession and dispossession,
introspection and ecstasy, present and future, the real and the ideal, the
indicative and the conditional. It involves what is true and what could be
good. We constitute ourselves by accepting who we are and moving be-
yond this.
In part two, it was shown that there is an objective and a subjective as-
pect to all human understanding. In one sense, our understanding is deter-
mined by the being of whatever object is understood. We need to be trans-
parent and responsive to the reality of the world. Everything we encounter
has an independence, a weight, and we cannot manipulate the facts of our
experience. If we make unrealistic plans or propose false interpretations of
the world, we are checked and even constrained by the resistance things
show.
In another sense, however, our understanding depends completely on
our personal involvement in the world. We can’t understand anything un-
less we take an active interest in it. Everything is seen from a certain per-
spective and understood in terms of the language and categories of the
one who understands. These categories are inseparable from the values of
those who use them, since all understanding embodies the lived priorities
of the individuals and groups who choose to understand. These categories
also make possible certain kinds of desires, since we can only desire what
we understand to be worthwhile. So desire, understanding, and purpose-
ful activity interconnect and unavoidably influence each other. Neverthe-
less, the element of circularity diminishes neither the objectivity of truth
nor the personal nature of desire. The truth is human, and objectivity is
always grasped through the subject. Knowledge is impossible without hu-
man commitment, and this commitment is impossible without an under-
standing of what we are like and what the world is like.
In part three, it was concluded that at any one moment, if we take into
account all the relevant facts at our disposal, there are always different ways
of looking at any situation, different reasons for acting, different goals we
 c o n c l u s i o n = 279

can pursue. Any of them would make sense of the objective understanding
we have of the world. We are free to act because we are free to think about
things in different ways. Uncertainty is the starting point of deliberation,
choice, and responsibility. We have to choose from the different possible
goods before us and project ourselves into a single future. In this way we
choose which person we will become. From the plethora of potentially sig-
nificant motives, we make some motives real by acting for them. Within
the constraints of our circumstances, we choose to live in one way rather
than another.
Freedom thus depends on two things: on accepting the limits of one’s
situation, and on reinterpreting these limits in the light of a particular fu-
ture. We have to accept our beginning and choose our end. Our actions are
not determined by our being, since our being is open-ended and ambigu-
ous. Our being, rather, is determined by our activity, as we project our-
selves toward a future self that does not yet exist. We decide the mean-
ing of our life and the priorities that will give it shape. For these reasons,
the person we are aiming to become is more significant than the person
we are. We constitute ourselves through our free choices, even though this
very freedom is something we have not chosen and something we cannot
disown.
In part four, it was shown that within each particular desire there is
a deeper and more universal longing for completion and perfect fulfill-
ment. Human beings do not just want to travel, we also want to arrive. We
are frustrated that our understanding is limited, our possessions insuffi-
cient, and our identity insecure. In other words, we want to be happy. So
we chase after an ideal moment in the future when desire as such will be
fulfilled and when we will finally become the person we wish to be. This
moment never comes because desire is infinite and self-coincidence im-
possible. Even though we create an identity through our free choices, and
may find a certain stability and satisfaction in recommitting ourselves to
that identity, we still have a distance from ourselves. We always see a future
opening up before us. We have some transitory experiences of happiness,
but perfect happiness eludes us and is in principle impossible to achieve in
the life that we know.
So for both Aquinas and Sartre, we are fragmented persons, internally
displaced, perpetually in exile from ourselves. This prospect both liberates
and terrifies us. We can try to escape the dilemma by pretending that we
280 = c o n c l u s i o n

are perfectly happy in the present, or by pretending that we will be per-

fectly happy in the future, or by pretending that we do not care about hap-
piness at all. Yet the dilemma comes back to haunt us, since it is a consti-
tutive part of our nature to seek a deeper happiness and to be aware that
any happiness we do achieve in the future will soon slip through our fin-
gers. The whole paradox can be expressed negatively (“human beings can
never be perfectly happy in this life”) or positively (“human beings can al-
ways seek a deeper happiness in this life”). Either way, it begs the question
of whether there is another kind of life possible for human beings, one in
which happiness could be found. Perhaps it is possible to attain to some
God-like kind of life beyond all the contradictions of temporal existence.
Perhaps it is possible to have all desire satisfied, and still to act; to under-
stand everything, and still to wonder; to have one’s life completed, and still
to live; to arrive, and still to keep moving. Perhaps it is possible to be happy
and to be free.
The question of freedom leads to the question of happiness, and the
question of happiness leads to the question of God. One’s thinking about
the possibility of final human happiness is part of what will determine one’s
thinking about the existence of God. Despite the identity we continually
create for ourselves, and the commitments we freely make, human life is
necessarily insufficient. We are constituted by incompletion since it is our
nature to go beyond ourselves and beyond the present. Our desire always
goes beyond anything in this life to an ideal of perfection which Sartre and
Aquinas associate with the divine. Both thinkers conclude that we cannot
find happiness without God. Their understanding of human freedom, per-
sonal identity, and the meaning of ultimate happiness is almost identical.
They disagree only about whether this happiness can ever be found.
Bi b l io g r a p h y

Works by Sartre
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Age of Reason (London: Penguin Books, 2001).
———. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontol-
ogy, translated by Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 1958).
———. Cahiers pour une Morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).
———. “Cartesian Freedom.” In Literary and Philosophical Essays
(New York: Collier Books, 1962).
———. Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Vol. 1: Théorie des ensembles
pratiques, Bibliothèque des Idées (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
———. L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1943).
———. L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, édition
corrigée avec index par Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard,
1996).
———. “Existentialism and Humanism.” In Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic
Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London: Routledge, 2001).
———. L’Existentialisme Est un Humanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
———. Huis Clos (London: Routledge, 1987).
———. Huis Clos and Other Plays (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
———. L’Imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
———. “The Itinerary of a Thought.” In Between Existentialism and
Marxism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
———. Lettres au Castor, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).
———. “Materialism and Revolution.” In Literary and Philosophical
Essays (New York: Collier, 1962).
———. Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
———. The Psychology of the Imagination (London: Routledge, 1972).
———. Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
———. Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
———. Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
———. Situations IX (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
———. La transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénomé-
nologique (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1972).
———. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Con-

281
282 = b i b l i o g r a p h y
sciousness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1957).
———. The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1964).

Works by Aquinas
Aquinas, Thomas. Commentum in quatuor libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lom-
bardi, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris angelici ordinis predicatorum Opera
omnia ad fidem optimarum editionum accurate recognita, vols. 6–7 (Parma: ty-
pis Petri Fiaccadori, 1856–1858).
———. De potentia. In Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2, ed. P. Pession (Turin/Rome:
Marietti, 1953).
———. “De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas.” In Sancti Thomae De Aquino
Opera Omnia. Iussu Impensaqu Leonis XIII P. M. Edita, vol. 43 (Rome: Editori
di San Tommaso, 1976).
———. The Disputed Questions on Truth, trans. Robert W. Mulligan, James V. Mc-
Glynn, and Robert W. Schmidt, 3 vols. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952).
———. On Evil, trans. Jean Oesterle (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1995).
———. On Evil, trans. Richard Regan, ed. Brian Davies (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2003).
———. On Human Nature (Indianapolis, Ind./Cambridge: Hackett, 1999).
———. On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists, trans. Beatrice H. Zedler
(Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1968).
———. Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia. (Rome: 1882– ).
[“Leonine” edition].
———. Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. Timothy McDermott (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
———. Summa Theologiae, ed. Thomas Gilby, 60 vols. (London: Blackfriars/Eyre
& Spottiswoode, 1963ff).
———. Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province,
5 vols. (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1948).
———. Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (Lon-
don: Methuen, 1989).

Works about Sartre

Anderson, Thomas C., ed., American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4
(1996). Special issue: Jean-Paul Sartre.
———. “Editor’s Introduction.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4
(1996). Special issue: Jean-Paul Sartre.
———. “Sartre and Human Nature,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70,
no. 4 (1996). Special issue: Jean-Paul Sartre.
———. Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity (Chicago: Open
Court, 1993).
Aronson, Ronald. Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980).
———. “Sartre’s Return to Ontology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987).
 b i b l i o g r a p h y = 283
Aronson, Ronald, and Adrian Van den Hoven. Sartre Alive (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne
State University Press, 1991).
Atwell, John E. “Sartre and Action Theory.” In Jean Paul Sartre: Contemporary Ap-
proaches to His Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Frederick A. Elliston
(Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980).
Ayer, A. J. “Novelist-Philosophers: V. Jean-Paul Sartre,” Horizon 12 (1945).
Barnes, Hazel E. An Existentialist Ethics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967).
———. “Sartre’s Ontology: The Revealing and Making of Being.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).
Beauvoir, Simone de. “Merleau-Ponty et le Pseudo-Sartrisme.” Les Temps Modernes
10, nos. 114–15 (1955).
Busch, Thomas W. The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in
Sartre’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
———. “Sartre’s Use of the Reduction: Being and Nothingness Reconsidered.” In
Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Sil-
verman and Frederick A. Elliston (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press,
1980).
Catalano, Joseph S. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”
(New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Cavaciuti, Santino. L’ontologia di Jean-Paul Sartre (Milan: Marzorati, 1969).
Caws, Peter. Sartre: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London, Boston, and Hen-
ley, U.K.: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1987).
Contat, Michel, and Michel Rybalka, eds. Les Écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, Bibliog-
raphie Commentée (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
Crosson, Frederick J. “Intentionality and Atheism: Sartre and Maritain.” The Mod-
ern Schoolman 64 (1987).
Davison, Ray. “Sartre Resartus: The Circuit of ‘Ipséité’ from London to Clermont
Ferrand. ‘L’être et le néant’ at 50.” Journal of European Studies 24 (1994).
Detmer, David. Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul
Sartre (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1988).
Dilman, Ilham. “Sartre and Our Identity as Individuals.” In Human Beings: Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 29, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991).
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Piotr Hoffman. “Sartre’s Changed Conception of Con-
sciousness: From Lucidity to Opacity.” In The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, ed.
Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981).
Dupont, Christian. “Receptions of Phenomenology in French Philosophy and Reli-
gious Thought, 1889–1939.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1997.
Edie, James M. “The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s Critique of Hus-
serl.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24 (1993).
———. “The Roots of the Existentialist Theory of Freedom in ‘Ideas I.’ ” Husserl
Studies 1 (1984).
Ellis, Fiona. “Sartre on Mind and World.” Sartre Studies International 6 (2000).
284 = b i b l i o g r a p h y
Fell, Joseph P. “Battle of the Giants over Being.” In The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sar-
tre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981).
———. Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1979).
Flynn, Thomas R. “Phenomenology and Faith: From Description to Explanation and
Back.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 64 (1990).
———. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Fourny, Jean-François, and Charles D. Minahen. Situating Sartre in Twentieth-
Century Thought and Culture (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1997).
Fretz, Leo. “Individuality in Sartre’s Philosophy.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Fry, Christopher M. Sartre and Hegel: The Variations of an Enigma in L’être et le né-
ant, Neuzeit Und Gegenwart: 4 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988).
Gardner, Sebastian. “Splitting the Subject: An Overview of Sartre, Lacan and Der-
rida.” Auslegung 10 (1983).
Gennaro, Rocco J. “Jean-Paul Sartre and the Hot Theory of Consciousness.” Cana-
dian Journal of Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2002).
Goldthorpe, Rhiannon. “Sartre and the Self: Discontinuity or Continuity?” Ameri-
can Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1996). Special issue: Jean-Paul
Sartre.
Gutting, Gary. French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
Haar, Michel. “Sartre and Heidegger.” In Jean Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches
to His Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Frederick A. Elliston (Pittsburgh,
Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980).
Hammond, Michael, Jane Howarth, and Russell Keat. Understanding Phenomenol-
ogy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
Hartmann, Klaus. Sartre’s Ontology: A Study of Being and Nothingness in the Light of
Hegel’s Logic (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966).
Hayman, Ronald. Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1986).
Howells, Christina, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992).
———. “Conclusion: Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject.” In The Cam-
bridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
———. Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988).
Jager, Bernd. “Sartre’s Anthropology: A Philosophical Reflection on La Nausee.” In
The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp, The Library of Living
Philosophers Vol. XVI (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981).
Jeanson, Francis. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans. Robert V. Stone (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
Jopling, David A. “Sartre’s Moral Psychology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sar-
tre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
 b i b l i o g r a p h y = 285
Keefe, Terry. “Sartre’s L’Existentialisme Est un Humanisme.” In Critical Essays on
Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Robert Wilcocks (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988).
LaCapra, Dominick. A Preface to Sartre (London: Methuen, 1979).
Laing, R. D., and D. G. Cooper. Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philoso-
phy, 1950–1960 (London: Tavistock, 1964).
Langer, Monika. “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: A Reappraisal.” In The Philosophy of
Jean Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981).
Leland, Dorothy. “The Sartrean Cogito: A Journey between Versions.” Research in
Phenomenology 5 (1975).
Marcel, Gabriel. “Being and Nothingness.” In Homo Viator, ed. Gabriel Marcel
(New York: Harper & Row, 1951).
Marcuse, Herbert. “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘L’être et le né-
ant.’ ” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948).
Maritain, Jacques. Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B.
Phelan (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1956).
McBride, William Leon. Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness (New
York and London: Garland, 1997).
McCulloch, Gregory. Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean
Themes (London: Routledge, 1994).
McLachlan, James. “The Theological Character of Sartre’s Atheology in ‘Being and
Nothingness.’ ” Epoche 5, nos. 1–2 (1997).
Mirvish, Adrian. “Sartre and the Gestaltists.” Journal of the British Society for Phe-
nomenology 11 (1980).
———. “Sartre on Perception and the World.” Journal of the British Society for Phe-
nomenology 14 (1983).
Morris, Phyllis Sutton. Sartre’s Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1976).
———. “Self-Creating Selves: Sartre and Foucault.” American Catholic Philosophi-
cal Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1996). Special issue: Jean-Paul Sartre.
Natanson, Maurice. A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology. Reprint. ed. (The
Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
Olafson, Frederick A. Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existen-
tialism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967).
Plantinga, Alvin. “An Existentialist’s Ethics.” Review of Metaphysics 12 (1958).
Qizilbash, M. “Aristotle and Sartre on the Human Condition: Lack, Responsibility
and the Desire to Be God.” Angelaki 3, no. 1 (1998).
Rybalka, Michel, Oreste F. Pucciani, and Susan Gruenheck. “An Interview with
Jean-Paul Sartre.” In The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp,
The Library of Living Philosophers Vol. XVI (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981).
Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, The Library of Living
Philosophers, Vol. XVI (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981).
Silverman, Hugh J., and Frederick A. Elliston. Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Ap-
proaches to His Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980).
Simont, Juliette. “Sartrean Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed.
Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
286 = b i b l i o g r a p h y
Spiegelberg, Herbert. The Context of the Phenomenological Movement (The Hague,
The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
———. The Phenomenological Movement. 3rd ed. (The Hague, The Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1982).
Thompson, Kenneth, and Margaret Thompson. Sartre: Life and Works (New York;
Bicester: Facts on File Publications, 1984).
Verstraeten, Pierre. “‘I Am No Longer a Realist’: An Interview with Jean-Paul Sar-
tre.” In Sartre Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van den Hoven (Detroit,
Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
Warnock, Mary. “Imagination in Sartre.” British Journal of Aesthetics 10 (1970).
Wider, Kathleen. The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Phi-
losophy of Mind (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
———. “The Failure of Self-Consciousness in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.” Dia-
logue: Canadian Philosophical Review 32 (1993).
———. “A Nothing about Which Something Can Be Said: Sartre and Wittgenstein
on the Self.” In Sartre Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van den Hoven
(Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
Wilcocks, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Jean-Paul Sartre (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988).
———. Jean-Paul Sartre: A Bibliography of International Criticism (Edmonton:
University of Alberta Press, 1975).
Wood, Philip R. “A Revisionary Account of the Apotheosis and Demise of the Phi-
losophy of the Subject: Hegel, Sartre, Heidegger, Structuralism, and Poststruc-
turalism.” In Situating Sartre in Twentieth-Century Thought and Culture, ed.
Jean-François Fourny and Charles D. Minahen (Basingstoke, U.K., and Lon-
don: Macmillan Press, 1997).

Works about Aquinas

Aertsen, Jan A. “Aquinas’s Philosophy in Its Historical Setting.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Ashley, Benedict M. “What Is the End of the Human Person? The Vision of God
and Integral Human Fulfillment.” In Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in
Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe, ed. Luke Gormally (Blackrock,
Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994).
Basti, Gianfranco. Filosofia dell’uomo (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1995).
Bowlin, John. Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
Boyle, Leonard E. “The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas—Revisited.”
In The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 2002).
Bradley, Denis J. M. Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human
Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1997).
Brock, Stephen. Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action
(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998).
 b i b l i o g r a p h y = 287
Burrell, David B. Aquinas: God and Action (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1979).
Caputo, John D. Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1982).
Celano, Anthony J. “The Concept of Worldly Beatitude in the Writings of Thomas
Aquinas.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 25 (1987).
Cessario, Romanus. Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics (South Bend, Ind.: Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press, 1991).
Chenu, Marie-Dominique. Toward Understanding Saint Thomas (Chicago: Regnery
Press, 1964).
Deferrari, Roy J., and Sister M. Inviolata Barry. A Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948).
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index

abstraction, 67n28 Averroes, 3, 7

absurdity: of choice, 165, 174 Averroism, 3–4, 7, 149–50
action, human: in Sartre, 23–24, 30, 32, Avicenna, 7
155–59 Ayer, A. J.: criticisms of Sartre, 16, 42
action theory, twentieth-century, 159n16
Aeterni Patris (Leo XIII), 9 Bachelard, Gaston, 13, 107
Age of Reason, The (L’Age de raison; bad faith, 28, 32, 186, 247–48, 254n53
Sartre), 12, 28 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 10
Alain. See Chartier, Emile August Barnes, Hazel, 34, 55
Albert the Great, 3 Basti, Gianfranco, 268
Ambrose: in Aquinas, 6 beatific vision, 8
l’amour. See love beatitudes, 6
angels, 62; as intellectual, 121 beatitudo. See happiness
anguish (angoisse): in Sartre, 24–32, 159–60, beauty: as ideal, 246
174; in Aquinas, 237–38, 261 being: in Aquinas, 74–79; as object of intel-
anima. See soul lect and will, 128; substantial and rela-
animals: apprehension, 63–64; and deliber- tive, 77–79
ation, 200–201; movement, 59; sensitive Being and Nothingness (Sartre): historical
appetite, 80, 122 background, 12–13; supposed repudia-
antirealism: in analytic tradition, 65 tion of, 18–19
appetite, rational. See will Being and Time (Heidegger), 11
appetitus. See desire being-for-itself, 37–43, 55–57, 94–95, 114–15,
apprehensions, unwilled, 132–35 245–47
Aquinas, Thomas: development of thought, being-in-itself, 41, 48, 94–95, 245–47
118; influences on, 6–8, 258n9; interpre- being-in-the-world, 93–97, 181–82
tation of, 8–12; life, 1; as philosopher, being there, 101–102
244–45, 264; as theologian, xvi–xvii, Beauvoir, Simone de: on facticity and flesh,
244–45 110
Aristotelianism, 7, 8–9; in Sartre, 26n9 Bergson, Henri, 11, 13, 167
Aristotle: on character development, 56; on Berkeley, George, 34
exterior mover of will, 230; on freedom, Bernard of Clairvaux, 2
88, 206, 207; on the good, 74; on happi- Bible: Old and New Testaments, 6
ness, 2; on human nature, 265; influence Blondel, Maurice, 11
on Aquinas, 6–8, 63; on knowledge, 63, body: in Aquinas, 196–97, 260; graceful,
66, 69; on virtue, 164 180; in Sartre, 103–6
Aron, Raymond, 15 Boethius: on happiness, 2
Aronson, Ronald, 112–13, 167 bonum. See good
aufheben. See surpass Bradley, Denis, 8, 271–72
Augustine: in Aquinas, 6; on delight, 261; on Brentano, Franz, 12
happiness, 2; influence on Aquinas, 119 Brock, Stephen, 59, 82–83, 222–23
authenticity, 253–54 Broglie, Louis de, 104
autrui. See other Burrell, David, 73, 138, 237

293
294 = i n d e x
Busch, Thomas, 17–18, 34, 36, 112 De principiis naturae (Aquinas), 7
Buzz Lightyear, 275 Derrida, Jacques, 42
Descartes, René: influence on Sartre, 14,
Camus, Albert, 168 45n96
cause, in Sartre, 31, 45–46 desire, 75, 249, 259–60; and instrumental-
Caws, Peter, 17, 42 ity, 98–102
Chagrin et la Pitié, Le, 189 determinism: and compatibilism, 147–48;
character, 237; effect on will, 220 in early Aquinas, 119; indeterminism
Chartier, Emile August (Alain), 13 in Sartre, 160–62; and intellectualism,
choice: in Aquinas, 131, 205–9; examples 142–43; rupture of, 26–31, 32; weaknesses
of, 84–90; and freedom, 143–44; non- in, 156–57
necessity of, 211–25; rationality of Detmer, David, 189–90
choice, 168–74; in Sartre, 163–68 De trinitate (Boethius), 7
Christ, 5-6; in Sartre, 251 De unitate intellectus (Aquinas), 3–4
Cicero: in Aquinas, 6 De veritate (Aquinas): historical back-
circuit de l’ipséité, le, 54–57 ground, 4
cliff walker, 26–28, 52 Dieu. See God
coefficient of adversity, 107–9, 187 Dilman, Ilham, 57
cogito, 14, 39 Dionysius, Pseudo-, 79
commitment: as ethical ideal, 249n32 Dominicans: Aquinas and, 5; on freedom,
communism: and Sartre, 179 2; Le Saulchoir, 9
compatibilism, 147, 230–33 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 179
conscience, la. See consciousness doubt, 46
conscience (de) soi. See self-consciousness dualism, 39, 41
consciousness: emptiness/transparency of,
35, 108–9; positional, 33–34; in Sartre, Eardley, P. S., 229–30
32–37, 52, 103; transcendence of, 34. See École Normale Supérieure, 11, 13
also self-consciousness Edie, James, 18
concupiscible appetite, 81 Ego: in Sartre, 17, 25, 55; transcendent, 36;
consilium. See deliberation transcendental, 36–37, 73
Constantine, 50, 157–58 electio. See choice
contemplation, 263 emotions, as intentional, 162
contingency: of being, 25, 196–98; of the ends: in Aquinas, 192–95; as chosen,
human perspective, 104–5 74n44, 159–62; indetermination of,
conversion: in Sartre, 175–80, 254, 269n46 201–5; possessed in intention or reality,
cosmology, medieval, 197 258–59
creation, 58 enjoyment, 256
culture, 25, 185; and language, 111 Ens causa sui, 251
l’en-soi-pour-soi. See in-itself-for-itself
Dasein 14, 112 epoche, 112
Davison, Ray, 191 equipment, 99n17
De anima (Aristotle), 66, 69 Eschmann, Ignatius, 5–6
death: in Aquinas 262; in Sartre, 247–48 “esse est percipi” (Berkeley), 34
De consolatione (Boethius), 6 essence: in Sartre, 25–26, 29–31, 57; as fol-
De divinis nominibus (Pseudo-Dionysius), 7 lowing existence, 167–68
De ente et essentia (Aquinas), 7 essentialism: in Sartre, 26
Degrees of Knowledge, The (Maritain), 12 ethics: existential, 252n44: in Sartre, 170,
De hebdomadibus (Boethius), 7 249n32; utilitarian, 276
deliberation: and choice, 207–8 L’Étranger (Camus), 168
delight, 256 être-dans-le-monde. See being-in-the-world
De malo (Aquinas): dating, 119; historical l’être-en-soi. See being-in-itself
background, 4 L’être et le néant (Sartre). See Being and No-
dépasser. See surpass thingness
 i n d e x = 295
l’être-pour-soi. See being-for-itself good, the: in Aquinas, 74–79; indetermi-
eudaimonia. See happiness nation of particular goods, 196–201;
Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 135, 230 perfect, 141–44; as perfection of be-
exercise of act of will, 124–28, 135–39, 218 ing, 76–79; as possessed, 256–57; ratio
exist: as transitive verb, 110 of, 122–23; as something desired, 74–76;
existence: preceding essence, 167–68 viewed as not-good, 139–44, 146–47, 211,
Existentialism and Humanism (L’Existenti- 218–19
alisme est un Humanisme; Sartre), 14–15, grace: in Sartre, 180
163–65 Gregory the Great: in Aquinas, 6
exitus-reditus, 7
experience, 34, 38, 94–95 Haldane, John, 65
happiness: in Aquinas, 256–73; as attracting
facticity (la facticité), 24–25, 31, 110–11, 157, the will, 123; disagreement about where
180–86; in Aquinas, 196–98 found, 202–4, 258; final end, 136–37, 193;
failure: in Sartre, 253–55 as goal of life, 279–80; history of ques-
family, xv tion, 2; impossibility of perfect happiness
fear: as motive, 85–86 in this life, 259–64; perfect and imper-
Fell, Joseph, 114 fect, 2, 7–8, 258; perfect good, 141; per-
Finnis, John, 209, 224 fect happiness in God, 264–67, 270–73;
Flannery, Kevin, 119, 209 in Sartre, 243–55
Flaubert, Gustave, 19, 157 Hartmann, Klaus, 113–14
flesh: and interworld, 108–10 Hause, Jeffrey, 227–29
Flynn, Thomas, 164 Hayman, Ronald, 14
form (forma), 60–62, 70; as universal, heaven, 3
215–17 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 43; influ-
Franciscans: on freedom, 2 ence on Sartre, 14
freedom: in Aquinas, 192–239, 278–79; and Heidegger, Martin: influence on Sartre, 13,
choice, 205–09; as choice about identity, 14–15, 40–41, 112; thought, 107
84–90; condemned to, 31, 182; contin- Heisenberg, Werner, 104
gency of, 182; for excellence, 169; history Hemingway, Ernest, 168
of question, 1–3; of indifference, 169; higher order volitions, 231
limits of, 180–86; not determined by hikers, 172
sensitive appetite, 82–84; persistence hope: in Sartre, 253–55
of existential, 186–91; in Sartre, 155–91, Howells, Christina, 18–19
278–79; Huis Clos (Sartre). See In Camera
free will. See freedom human reality: as substitute for Dasein, 112
Freud, Sigmund: influence on Sartre, 18, 185 Husserl, Edmund: influence on Sartre, 13,
15–16, 33, 35–37; the natural attitude,
Gallagher, David, 120, 128, 204, 212, 229, 238 98n17, 111; reception in France, 11–12
gambler, 27–28, 52, 85–86, 175–77
Garcin (In Camera), 248 Ibn Rushd. See Averroes
Gauthier, R.-A., 5, 119 Ibn Sina. See Avicenna
gestaltism, 96–98 ideal, the, 245–47
Gide, André, 55n132, 179 idealism, 39; Sartre accused of, 113–16; Sar-
Giles of Rome, 229 tre’s critique of, 96–98
Gilson, Étienne, 9, 10, 58 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
God: as external principle of will, 230, and to a Phenomenological Philosophy
235–26; as final end, 199–200, 266; as (Ideen; Husserl), 15, 18
highest intellectual principle in Aquinas, identity: in Aquinas, 59–60, 224, 237–39,
134–35; natural desire for, 8n25, 270–73; 277–78; as denied, 40–43; as given,
not a source of ends in Sartre, 161; in 24–26; objectification, 248–49; as open
Sartre, 250–53, 255, 267–70; as universal 69–74; result of choice, 87–89; in Sartre,
good, 266–67 23–57, 277–78
296 = i n d e x
Idiot of the family, The (Sartre), 19 Lacan, Jacques: influence on Sartre, 18,
image: in Sartre, 46 41n79, 185
L’Imaginaire. See Psychology of the Imagi- lack, 48–53, 157
nation language: and freedom 111; in Sartre, 25
imagination: in Sartre, 43–46 Leo XIII, 9
immanence, 47 Le Saulchoir, 9
In Camera (Sartre), 248 Letter on Humanism (Heidegger), 14
Index: of prohibited books, 11 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 15
Inès (In Camera), 248 liberum arbitrium, 1–2, 195–96. See also
in-itself-for-itself, 243–47, 267–70 freedom
instinct: animal and human 81–82; in Aqui- Lisska, Anthony, 86
nas, 196–97; in Sartre, 32 look, the, 248–49
instrumentality: in Sartre, 98–102 Lottin, Odon, 119
intellect: activated by will, 135–39; in Aqui- Louvain: Higher Institute of Philosophy, 9
nas, 63–74; immateriality of, 67–69; in- love, xv; in Sartre, 249
terdependence with will, 121–24; know- Lubac, Henri de, 10
ing itself, 72–74; meaning of, 194–95;
priority of, 132–35; reflexivity, 128–35; le manqué. See lack
taking form of other things, 64–67, Marcuse, Herbert: criticisms of Sartre, 16,
69–74, 79–80 unity of, 3–4 187
intellectualism, xi–xii, 142–43, 224–25 Maréchal, Joseph, 9
intellectualist interpretations of Aquinas, Maritain, Jacques, ix–x, 9, 12, 204
226–33 Marx, Karl: influence on Sartre, 18, 185
intellectus. See intellect Marxism: Sartre against, 189
intellectus possibilis, 66 materia. See matter
intentionality: in Bachelard, 107; in Sartre, matter, 60–62
32–37, 43 Matthieu (L’Age de Raison), 28
intentional structure of human act, 155–58, la mauvaise foi. See bad faith
161 McCabe, Herbert, 68
interworld, 16, 108–10 McCulloch, Gregory, 186
l’ipséité, 53–57 McDermott, Timothy, 65–66
irascible appetite, 81 Me, the, 30, 37, 39, 55, 57
Isidore of Seville: in Aquinas, 6 meaning: in Sartre, 48
measurement: and human values, 104
James, William, 34 memory: as interpretation, 177–78
Jaspers, Karl: influence on Sartre, 13 Mercier, Désiré, 9
Jeanson, Francis, 35, 39 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: criticisms of Sar-
Jerome: in Aquinas, 6 tre, 16, 108–11
Jesuits: interpretations of Aquinas, 9 metaphysics, 94, 114, 251
John Damascene: in Aquinas, 6 mind-world identity theory (Haldane), 65
John of La Rochelle, 2 le moi. See Me
Jopling, David, 163 moi-profond, 167
judgment: in choice, 207 monism, 39
Moore, G. E., 51n118
Kenny, Anthony, 8 moral sources, 276–77
Kerr, Fergus, 9–10 Morris, Phyllis Sutton, 171, 176, 178, 186
Kierkegaard, Søren: influence on Sartre, motivation. See motive
13; teleological suspension of ethical, motive (motif), 28, 31, 155–59, 162–63,
170 171–74; incommensurability of motives,
knowledge: in Aquinas, 63–74, 117–151; in 163–65
Sartre, 104–5, 111–16
Köhler, Wolfgang, 13, 96–97 Naples, University of, 7
le Néant. See nothingness
 i n d e x = 297
negation: and constitution of end, 157–59; Psychology of the Imagination, The (Sar-
in Sartre, 40, 43–46, 52, 94–95 tre), 47
négatités, 44, 157–58 Ptolemy: in Aquinas, 6
neighbor, 110 purpose: in Sartre, 98–102
Neoplatonism: in Aquinas, 7
Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 6, 7–8, 76 Quaestiones disputatae: historical back-
nothingness, 40 ground, 4
questioning: in Sartre, 45
objectivity and subjectivity: in Aquinas,
117–151; in Sartre, 93–116 Raskolnikov (Dostoyevsky), 179
Odo Regaldus, 2 ratio agendi, 125
Olafson, Frederick, 252–53 rational appetite. See will
ontological proof: of the world, 34 rationality of choice: in Sartre,168–74
ontology, phenomenological, 94 realism, 39; in analytic tradition, 65; in Sar-
oppression: and freedom, 187–89 tre, 96–98, 113–17
other, the, 248–49 réalité-humaine. See human reality
reason: in Aquinas, 82–84; indetermina-
Paris: Faculty of Arts, 3, 7; Faculty of The- tion of, 208, 209–17; will’s influence over,
ology, 3, 9 217–26
Pasnau, Robert, 230–33 reflexivity of intellect and will, 128–35, 148
perception: in Sartre, 96–98 le regard. See look
perfection: in Aquinas, 74–79 relationships: in Sartre, 248–49
personhood: in Aquinas, 70n37, 71, 89–90, resistance of the world, 180–82; and objec-
200, 237–39; in Sartre, 17, 35, 53–57, tivity, 107–11
165–68, 249 rest: in possession of the good, 256–57
perspectivism: in Sartre, 103–6 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 5
Peter Lombard. See Sentences riches, and happiness, 203, 260–61
phenomenology: Husserlian, 33; reception Robert Kilwardby, 9
in France, 11–12 Roman law: in Aquinas, 6
Philip the Chancellor, 2 Rome, 50
Philoktetes (Gide), 179 Rousselot, Pierre, 9
Pinckaers, Servais-Théodore, 6, 169–70
place, the human, 101–2 sadism, 249
plants: movement, 58–59 salvation: in Sartre, 254
play, 254 Sartre, Jean-Paul: faith, 11; influences on,
pleasure: and happiness, 203; possession of 13–16; interpretation of, 16–19; later
good, 256 work, 19, 185n106; life, 10–12, 110n66
politics, xv, 25 Scheler, Max: influence on Sartre 13; and
Popper, Karl, 149 objectivity, 107
possibility: in Sartre, 48–53 Scholasticism, nineteenth-century, xiii
postmodernism, 275 science, and human purposes, 102–4
potentia aestimativa, 80 Sein und Zeit (Heidegger). See Being and
preference: in Aquinas, 205–09 Time
presence to self (la présence à soi): in Aqui- Selbstheit, 55n133
nas, 72–74; in Sartre, 39, 42, 166–67 self: in Aquinas, 66, 237–39; deep, 167; in
pride, 248 Sartre, 38, 41–42, 53–57, 163–68; and sin-
prison: and freedom, 187–191 cerity; in Wittgenstein, 36n49
prochain, mon. See neighbour self-coincidence, 41, 245–47
project, the, 162, 168–74; collapse of, 179 self-consciousness: in Aquinas, 72–74,
Pseudo-Dionysius: influence on Aquinas, 128–32; in Sartre, 37–43, 171, 245–47
6, 7 self-deception. See bad faith
psychoanalysis, existential: 186, 254 self-movement, 82–83; of will, 130–31,
psychological determinism: 157 233–39
298 = i n d e x
selfness, 53–57 Time and Freewill (Bergson), 13
sensitive appetite, 80–81, 83, 88, 122, 196–98, Torrell, Jean-Pierre, 5
200–201 Toy Story, 275
sensitive apprehension: in Aquinas, 63–64; Transcendence of the Ego, The (La Trans-
in Sartre, 99–101 cendance de l’ego, Sartre), 17, 18, 35–37,
Sentences (Peter Lombard), 5, 7 38, 54–55
seriousness (sérieux), 53, 186, 254 transcendent object, 33
shame, 248 truth: as object of intellect and will, 128;
sheep: as lacking freedom, 85–86 objectivity of, 150–51; in Sartre, 114–16,
Siger of Brabant, 3 183n99; and subjectivity, 118
sin, 269n46
sincerity (la sincérité), 29–30, 86, 180, 186 understanding, 278; in Aquinas, 63–74,
situation, the, 184 75, 117–52; exercise of, 137–38; in Sartre,
Société Thomiste, 12 93–116
le soi. See self universals, 215–17
Sokolowski, Robert, 112 l’ustensilité. See instrumentality
soul, 62–63, 65, 69–72, 120; powers of,
127–28, 130; subsistence of, 62 values: as ideals, 246, 267; and instrumen-
specification of human act, 124–28, 212 tality, 98–102; and motives, 156–57; in
Spiegelberg, Herbert, 17, 37 Sartre, 48–53
Stalag XII D, 11 vécu, 19, 185
structuralism, 25; Sartre’s opposition to, 111, Venus de Milo, 50
184–85 Verstraeten, Pierre, 191
Stump, Eleonore, 133 vertigo, 24–32
subject, 34, 42; non-substantial, 34–35 Vichy regime, 191
subjectivity, 34; in Aquinas, 117–51; and ob- voluntarism, xi–xii, 142–43, 224–25; in later
jectivity, 93–116 Aquinas, 119; not in Sartre, 168–74
suffering, existential, 252; as motive, 158; in voluntas. See will
Sartre, 50–52
Summa theologiae: historical background waiter, café, 29, 31
and structure, 5–6 Warnock, Mary, 44
surpass, 43 Westberg, Daniel, 119
Suttor, Timothy, 68 will: activating intellect, 135–39; in Aqui-
nas, 79–84; indetermination of particu-
Taylor, Charles, 224–25, 275–77 lar goods, 198–99; influence over reason,
technique: as human activity, 107; language 217–26; interdependence with intellect,
as, 111 121–24; meaning of, 194–95; non-
Tempier, Stephen, 3 necessity of movement, 139–142; reflexiv-
temporality: in Aquinas, 215–17, 260, 263; in ity, 128–35; role in specifying good, 139–
Sartre, 158, 175–80, 246–47 144; self-movement, 233–39
theology: in Sartre, 250–253 William of Auxerre, 2, 3
La Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénomé- William of Ockham, 169
nologie de Husserl (Levinas), 15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36n49
Thomism: existential, 9; nineteenth- and wonder, 260
twentieth-century, 9; and phenomenol- world: in Aquinas, 148–51; and objectivity,
ogy, 12; transcendental, 9 107–111; in Sartre, 33, 93–96
Aquinas & Sartre on Freedom, Personal Identity, and the Possibility of
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