Consciousness, Freedom, and Responsibility: A Pre-Reflective, Non-Positional, and Non-Localised Form of Agency

For Sartre, human existence is shaped by the twin notions of freedom and responsibility. In this paper, I develop and defend this position by providing a phenomenological account of a pre-reflective, non-positional, and non-localised form of agency. More specifically, I argue that a pre-reflective sense of possibility is a structural feature of consciousness, that it is world-directed, and that it cannot be isolated to any particular act of will. At the same time, for Sartre, consciousness can be characterised by its lack of inertia. Though our projects are layered in complex and interwoven patterns, there is also a sense of groundlessness which haunts our commitments. Thus, at the bottom of it all, we find an ultimate sense of responsibility as we are forced to commit ourselves entirely to our particular way of being. My aim in this article is to present this account as phenomenologically plausible. As I will show, in this Sartrean picture, to be free does not mean to decide, it means that freedom, consciousness and the world are inextricably bound together as a unified whole.