On Responsibility

What is responsibility? Its a word that get throw around a lot. Be responsible, responsibility=maturity, take responsibility for your actions, we are responsible for how are life unfolds...

I wonder what people and society are truly trying to say. I wonder what the implications of the concept of responsibility have on the individual and for a society.

In reading about responsibility I came across the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 to 1980. He was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and resistance fighter during WWII. Sartre suggests that responsibility and freedom are synonymous and the greatest limitation to freedom is any self-imposed tyranny caused by not understanding or accepting that self-responsibility is inevitable. For Sartre when we deny that we are self-responsible for the situations we find ourselves in, for our actions, thoughts, and even world events then we begin to placate to a narrative of pre-determination which subjugates us and leads to a narrow and single-serving type of existence left for material objects. Sartre describes how material objects have an essence prior to their existence. He gives the example of the knife and book, explaining that before the object can exist it must be produced (Sartre, 3-4). For humans, this type of existence is a form of tyranny and is created when self-mastery is given up, which allows for coercion and destructive self-identities to forgo autonomy allow for subjugating actions and thoughts to perpetuate.

For Sartre, freedom can best be described as self-determination. Freedom for him is mostly concerned with personal experience and as developing personal responsibility. He explains that “existence precedes essence…. that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards” (Sartre, 5). What Sartre is describing is the development of the free individual, where one comes into existence as a means to create what it means to exist. In other words to be free is the ability to define oneself. For Sartre, the ability to be free stems from that fact that we are free, to be born a human is to be born free. Sartre states, “We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free” (Sartre, 10). No matter what we do according to Sartre we are free, we are blessed with self-mastery which enables self-awareness and the ability to objectively take responsibility through action to personalize and create our own identity (essence).

Sartre’s notion of responsibility is that we create ourselves when we utilize our existence to create our essence we are doing so for all of humanity. This means not only is the individual’s essence being created through personalized action but that of every other person, for every action has a reaction and can hinder or promote the essence of all humanity (Sartre, 7). This responsibility of being accountable for the rest of humanity dawns upon the individual through what Sartre describes as “anguish.” For Sartre anguish is not negative but actually liberating, by the way it acts as a mechanism for helping people to realize they are part of something bigger and that their actions are not meaningless (and do affect others). Sartre educates that when one feels anguish “one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing” (7, Sartre). This inner dialog is at the heart of self-mastery for Sartre. It allows one to realize that controlling another person in any way is detrimental to all of society because it hinders self-definition. The importance of this for freedom and where modern cultures fall short of facilitating it can be summarized in this passage by Sartre: “we will freedom for freedom’s sake… And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own” (24, Sartre). What Sartre is proposing here is that freedom for all is conditional on the freedom for the individual and vice-versa.