Abstract

In this essay I argue: that Sartre's account of freedom falls back into the Cartesian problems it is explicitly designed to escape ; that Sartre simply pushes the old Cartesian problem of how a spontaneity can act on an object back to the level of pre-reflective original freedom, without solving it; that Merleau-Ponty's account does indeed move us beyond the Cartesian dilemmas by rooting freedom in its pre-reflective ground of meaning, which, in essence, is the body's pre-reflective relationality to the world; and that Sartre's account of freedom rests only on the obstacle/task dialectic while Merleau-Ponty's account seems to rest on the richer dialectics of both obstacle/task and giving/receiving.