ABSTRACT
The dramatic antagonistic experience Jean-Paul Sartre regards as metaphysically basic is in fact a kind of interpersonal disturbance or distortion, a felt deviation from a social equilibrium that is ordinarily inconspicuous precisely because it is so pervasive in our experience and our understanding. Even more central to Sartre’s existentialism than the drama of intersubjectivity that he chronicles both in Being and Nothingness and in his novels and plays is the idea of freedom. Sartre’s doctrine of radical freedom, then, is that a motive functions as the cause of an action only by already having been selected by reasons for doing what one does, that is, by being freely taken up. Solipsism is incoherent, for what it envisages is precisely what it itself can make no sense of, namely the radical absence of the other. Freedom is not the same as power, nor is radical freedom tantamount to omnipotence.
