How Is Descartes Condemned To Be Free

Sartre took Descartes’s Cogito Ergo Sum – I think; therefore, I am – as his philosophical point of departure. However, unlike Descartes who had considered his consciousness as a guarantee of his own reality, Sartre believed that the consciousness enables us to identify the reality of external things. Being an existentialist, he took a rather ‘atheistic’ approach to argue that humans are ‘condemned to be free’. With God out of the circle of reality, he goes on to disagree with the Aristotelian view of human nature that, for example, before there is a chair, there is some idea of the chair, and claims that it is the opposite that is true of a man. According to Sartre, first a man exists and then its idea does because without knowing that the

Which literally refers to the idea that it is essential for a human to exist before the formation or ‘invention’ of his essence; Man is "condemned to be free" and, at the same time, free to make or rather "invent" himself time and

When it proposes that existence comes first, it implies that the consciousness exists at the first place too. Considering that consciousness decides how to respond to facticity, how can it exist produced from no source with an essential facticity? We are scientifically aware that the non-physical existence of consciousness is directly related to the physical existence of the brain. And in fact, it is the brain that produces consciousness: damaging person’s brain with affect the consciousness level of the person. A person in perfect health will answer questions differently than someone who’s part of the brain, responding to those particular type of questions, was removed. This means that in order to have consciousness man must have a functional brain and the facticity of the brain which gives him the nature or the ‘essence’ that will limit his scope of response to a given stimulus in the future. From this point of view, existence does not precede essence and what actually happens is the opposite. This, however, doesn’t mean that an individual may not make decisions or view situations differently but that the extent of doing so is dependent upon that individual’s