ABSTRACT
In the course of expounding his theory of imagination, three years before Being and Nothingness, Sartre makes a comment that might seem somewhat surprising. ‘It is not determinism’, he tells us, ‘but fatalism that is the inverse of freedom’ (IPPI: 47). He might seem to be denying here that there is any opposition between determinism and freedom, thereby endorsing a compatibilist approach to freedom rather than the incompatibilist account we considered in chapter 5. He might seem to be saying, that is, that freedom would be threatened only by fatalism, by the inevitability of some future outcome regardless of our current thoughts, decisions, and behaviour. This would be the claim that although Oedipus was not free to avoid killing his father and marrying his mother, our futures are indeed contingent on the decisions we make, so we have a freedom that was denied to Oedipus regardless of whether determinism is true or not.
