SPEP 2025 (Online) – Oct 24, 2025
Perhaps one of the most often-quoted existentialist phrases is philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that we are “condemned to be free.” This phrase rests on the idea that we don’t have any specific human nature or predestined fate, and that therefore we are radically responsible for what we do in response to the situations we encounter and the life we shape. Philosopher Angela Davis’s 1969 “Lectures on Liberation” address this idea, starting from a critical engagement with Sartre.[i] These lectures took Black literature, notably Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times, as philosophical accounts of freedom grounded in the experience of struggling against enslavement. Davis begins with the observation that freedom has been a constant theme in Western philosophy. She says, “One of the most acute paradoxes present in the history of Western society is that while on a philosophical plane freedom has been delineated in the most lofty and sublime fashion, concrete reality has always been permeated with the most brutal forms of unfreedom, of enslavement.”[ii] Every philosopher who has thought about freedom has done so in a social world that includes enslaved people; only some of those philosophers have been enslaved themselves. Davis goes on to elaborate the beginnings of a conception of liberation that she has continued to unfurl ever since, starting from the views of people who have personally struggled for freedom. She writes, “Most important here will be the crucial transformation of the concept of freedom as static, given principle into a concept of liberation, the dynamic, active struggle for freedom.”[iii] Instead of thinking of freedom as a possession that we can have, or an attribute belonging to some people at the cost of denying it to others, Davis offers the idea that it is through the ongoingness of struggle that we practice liberation.
Davis implicitly refers in her thinking about freedom being a constant struggle to a song popular in the US Civil Rights movement at the time. This song had the lyrics: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle (3x)/Oh Lord we’ve been struggling so long/we must be free, we must be free.” In the Broadside Singers version, the middle verses replace “struggle” with “dying,” “sorrow,” “longing,” before returning to “struggle” – we’ve been dying so long, sorrowing so long, longing so long, struggling so long, we must be free. “We must be free” here is both an evocation of a future state and evidence; it is imperative that we become free, and the struggle demonstrates that we already are free, or else we would not struggle. This song transmits something beautiful about what it means to take liberation as an ongoing process. Saying that “freedom is a constant struggle” sounds like a bummer: You’re going to work on this forever and it’s not going to be fun. From this approach, though, instead of the struggle being a slog, it is a joy. It’s not that after we struggle for a long time we’ll become free, it’s because we’ve been struggling so long that we know we are free. A person can be enslaved for their whole life, dying, sorrowing, longing, and they are still practicing freedom.
Davis explains this through critically examining Sartre’s conception of freedom in Being and Nothingness. There, Sartre depicts even an enslaved person as having fundamental freedom. They can choose to remain enslaved or they can choose to resist even at the risk of death. Davis notes that this choice can’t be simply between enslavement and suicide, because choosing death abolishes “the very condition of freedom, life.” When we look at the decisions we make in the concrete, real world, she says, the world in which actual people have struggled for freedom, we should understand that “the choice, slavery or death, could either mean slavery or suicide, or on the other hand slavery or liberation at all costs. The difference between the two situations is crucial.”[iv] To choose liberation at all costs is world- and self-transforming.
Choosing to practice liberty changes us and changes the world. This is because we’re part of the world; it shapes us and we shape it. The social and material conditions outside of us are the situation of our choices. In that context, we still can take the responsibility of a choice. For people comfortable with fixed hierarchies, it can work really well to place the responsibility of choice on a higher power. People say, “I’m doing this because my religious traditions and teachers said this is the way to do things.” Or, “I need to do this because my boss is making me.” Take the example of white people disavowing our implication in racial oppression, or behaving as though it has nothing to do with us. Davis names the pretense that we have no choice in enforcing institutions of oppression something that mutilates our humanity.[v] I think about Davis’s claim here in relation to the discussion above about wicked problems: The world and therefore the most intimate details of our life in it entangle us in regimes of horror about which we have very limited capacities for transformation. We don’t have many choices about how to change things, especially when we confront the world as individuals – we genuinely have limits on what we can do. This fact is not what mutilates our humanity. The thing that mutilates our humanity, for Davis, is disavowing the capacity we have to make choices within the array available to us, and to create more options to choose. Ultimately for her, the thing that mutilates our humanity is pretending that we cannot change the institutions of oppression that shape the conditions of life on Earth at the moment.
As philosopher George Yancy puts it in his examination of Frederick Douglass’s work as existential theory, “The white racist attempts to deny the truth of his or her existence: freedom. …They refuse to recognize their whiteness as a choice, and the material and psychological implications of such a choice on Black people, for this would bring them face-to-face with their anguish. In other words, to reject their whiteness as a superior natural ontological kind, they would be forced to engage in the reflective apprehension of themselves as freedom and realize that nothing relieves them of the necessity of continually choosing themselves.”[vi] So, this exercise of not lying about our capacity to act is profoundly different depending on how we are placed in relations of oppression and benefit. Racially oppressed people experience ongoing attempts to make them into things rather than people; their expression of freedom rejects these attempts at the level of their very being. White people could live our freedom through rejecting the idea that whiteness is a superior natural ontological kind. More often, of course, we retreat into the lie that we are not responsible for the world. Here, being responsible for the world as a practice of freedom involves practicing the capacity to shape the structures of the world, not only to choose from the existing choices.
In a world structured in and through the remnants of enslavement in the past, in a world that continues to enact the conditions that produced that enslavement, how do we take responsibility for both the world as it is, and for worlds that do not exist yet? As Davis frames it, we aim not just towards ending particular incidents of oppression, but the entire systems in which those incidents are made to be ordinary. We cannot choose to end institutions all by ourselves, but we ourselves can take actions that move towards abolishing the collective forms that force us into inhumanity. We can work as hard as we can to abolish imprisonment, just as people of the past worked to abolish chattel slavery. As individuals in struggle they could not win that alone; it was an impossible task for any one person to do. The abolition of enslavement could not have been won had abolitionists not devoted their life’s energy to the work; it was only through their commitment that it was accomplished.
Circumstances not of our own choosing
I want to follow Angela Davis in thinking about freedom in the context of actually existing oppression. When I consider what it means to be free the context of enslavement, ecocide, or any wicked problem, the question becomes, What does it mean to try to change the world? Marxists have thought about this question in terms of “making history,” though not in circumstances of our own choosing
We’re all of us embedded in a complicated situation that we did not choose. We’re born into the middle of ongoing overlapping processes, which means that any beginning, transformation, or new direction necessarily starts from conditions beyond our control. This fact invites us to start collective deliberation from the middle – of time, of relationships, of practices – in setting collective goals. And that collectivity includes the world, not just other human reasoners. We are embedded in flows of ongoingness that are beyond our control, and we’re determining our means and ends from there.
For the enslaver, freedom is a possession, a fixed attribute that can be held and had – or, conversely, essentially absent. This is one definition of humanness: If to be human is to be free, then enslaved people are fundamentally and in essence unfree and less than human. This reveals an inherent contradiction, which Davis’s articulation of Frederick Douglass’s dialectical method reveals: enslavement, the work of alienating people from freedom, is a process and a social relation. There is no essence according to which some people are free and others unfree. Freedom itself is a relation, and a process. As Davis says,
The slave is actually conscious of the fact that freedom is not a fact, it is not a given, but rather something to be fought for, it can only exist through a process of struggle. The slave-master, on the other hand, experiences his freedom as inalienable and thus as a fact: he is not aware that he too has been enslaved by his own system.[vii]
Through rejecting the image of unfreedom encoded in the very idea of chattel slavery, the enslaved person comes to “reject his own existence, to reject himself as a slave.”[viii] This rejection opens the practice of freedom as about both our being and our understanding, a jointly ontological and epistemic project that negates any idea of freedom as a possession. It affirms the freedom to affirm and choose not only a different self, but a different world.
Davis writes, “Resistance, rejection on every level, on every front, are integral elements of the voyage towards freedom. Alienation will become conscious through the process of knowledge.”[ix] In Frederick Douglass’s case, this included his actual practice of building literacy as a way to confront the ontology of enslavement, but coming to knowledge of alienation is also part of the work of liberation. Confronting this form of alienation requires not merely personal liberation but instead the abolition of the very structure of the world that has produced enslavement. As philosopher Eddie O’Byrn argues, the conception of alienation Davis articulates here arises out of her deep understanding of Hegelian and Marxist philosophy but moves beyond them. It is not limited to a standard Marxist account of the labor relation, but instead is “based in the lived experience of those who are both denied the means of production and are used by their oppressors as the means of production.” [x] It matters not just who owns the factory or the store (the means of production), but whether people are put in the position of being owned as the means of production (as enslaved people were) or the material on which other people labor (as incarcerated, disabled, and elder people are).[xi]
This is a key difference, for me, between existential approaches that devolve into fantasies of personal agency and those that are useful to earthlings today. As Davis says,
Moreover, it is not just his individual condition that the slave rejects and thus his misery is not just a result of his individual unfreedom, his individual alienation. True consciousness is the rejection of the institution itself and everything which accompanies it. “It was slavery and not its mere incidents that I hated.” To foreshadow Frederick Douglass’ path from slavery to freedom, even when he attains his own freedom, he does not see the real goal as having been attained. It is only with the total abolition of the institution of slavery that his misery, his desolation, his alienation will be eliminated. And not even then, for there will remain remnants and there still remain in existence today the causes which gave rise to slavery.[xii]
We have individual conditions and experiences, but the institutions and remnants that produced them must be destroyed if we are, however we are placed, to practice relations of freedom. Practicing freedom is specific to our position relative to the remnants and causes that still remain in existence today: white people, who benefit from those remnants and causes have a different ongoing struggle than people who were subjected to colonialism and enslavement. The total abolition of the institution of slavery is an ongoing practice of liberation, dialectically produced through our activities. And, as Davis notes, the methods we use in the practice of freedom will vary – “No one formula can suffice.”[xiii] This holds for the methods we take up, and for the difference in our methods depending on how we are socially placed. The struggle for freedom is different if we inherit the legacies of being enslavers and colonizers than for those who inherit legacies of resistance.
Facing the responsibility of freedom can produce anguish, angst, and anxiety, and generally a desire to flee. In existential terms, we might then practice “bad faith.” This is when we try to lie to ourselves to escape our own freedom, our own possibility of being responsible for the choices we can make. Again, the distribution of choices is political, and how we think about the choices we have is also political. People who benefit from oppression will be structurally placed in relations of bad faith, because we have more actual choice to shape the options available to ourselves and others, but are shaped to pretend that the world as we receive it is, “just the way it is.” It is easy to implicitly stop at this individual and apolitical level of thinking about bad faith, to think of an existential crisis as a matter of our private biography or our personal decisions. This makes sense; only we know when we’re lying to ourselves about our situation or what we can make of it, even if we disavow that knowledge – being in bad faith is always personal. And indeed, it might be that we are always personally surfing the edge of authenticity, in part because we are always living our life at the nexus of our personal life and the way we are placed in a bigger and more complicated social world; think here of our consumption decisions, or what we say about genocide.
One of the most important interventions in the tradition of existential thinking in the Black tradition is a recognition of the centrality of sociality.[xiv] I hasten to emphasize: There are many forms of sociality that intensify oppression rather than building liberation; simply evoking that something is collective or social doesn’t tell us much about the politics involved. Still, here it is helpful to think of relationality and intersubjectivity as central to our capacities to practice existential freedom – disavowing this is a form of bad faith. Such disavowal builds on several lies: that we are individual, separable from the world; that our selves are not shaped through and with other people’s subjectivities; and finally, that we have no capacity to shape the social world that constitutes us. We are in conditions not of our own choosing, but these are the only ones in which anyone has ever made history.
What we can make of the world we’re in, from this approach, depends very much on whether we take seriously that we bring society into being. There is not some master plan or directing hand – it is us, humans, who make the world that then shapes us. Practicing freedom as a dynamic collective act of liberation responds to this call to go to the roots of the history we inherit to choose, and participate in making, a different world. This means: The conditions under which we make history are fundamentally unjust, and there’s a distribution of who benefits from ecocide and the inheritances of enslavement. Any “we” is contingent, fraught, and co-constituted. How we take up the practice of creating a different world is a hinge question in thinking about collectivity. If all of us are creating ourselves without a blueprint, which I think we are, how exactly are we connected with others, who are themselves self-shaping meaning-making creatures? And if society shapes us and we shape society, how exactly do we practice different worlds?[xv] I’m most interested in the question of how an attunement to collectivity can help with making more generous collective decisions about freedom for ourselves and the world.
Shaping the world that shapes us
Formerly enslaved people freed themselves; oppressed people today continue to collectively free themselves. This fundamental situation is one of the anchors I return to throughout this book. While it is humans who oppress other humans, freedom is not granted by anyone else; it is accomplished or enacted by people practicing liberation
As philosophers like Davis and O’Bryn show, taking up to collectivity is an existentially demanding project of enacting the understanding that we shape the social world that has shaped us. We create the world in which freedom can be practiced, and we do that over and over again. And at the same time as this is a collective endeavour, it is something we personally have to decide to do and commit to.
As Davis writes (again, in 1971, when “man” was widely accepted as a gender-expansive term): “One of the lessons we can learn from the dialectical method is that in the process of functioning in the world, man undergoes changes himself that are consonant with his actions. That is, man cannot perform a task in the world without himself being affected by that performance.”[xvi] Davis, and many of the philosophers of existence who place themselves in conversation with her, attends in particular to what acting in accord with white supremacy does to white people: it mutilates white people’s own humanity. So, we can ask how we create worlds in which freedom for everyone is a genuine possibility. Our human freedom might be not primarily about the choices we make within existing structures, but instead about what we do to shape those structures and the options available for people to choose from and build on.
[i] I’m grateful to Eddie O’Byrn for their writing about these lectures and Sartre’s existentialism (O’Byrn 2022), discussed more below, and for a generous zoom conversation discussing my reading of Davis’s thinking in these lectures; their forthcoming book will be a field-shaping engagement with Black feminism and existential philosophy.
[ii] Douglass & Davis, 45
[iii] Douglass & Davis, 46-7
[iv] Douglass & Davis, 48-9
[v] Davis’s engagement of the specific sites at which Frederick Douglass embodies freedom is enormously rich. One of the most-cited discussions in her text concerns the point at which Douglass physically resists the agent of enslavement, Mr. Covey, who takes as his task “breaking” the humanity and capacity for freedom in enslaved people. Douglass fights back; he is not broken.
Reflecting on the subject position of the “slave breaker” in Douglass’s text, Mr. Covey, Davis says:
One of the lessons we can learn from the dialectical method is that in the process of functioning in the world, man undergoes changes himself which are consonant with his actions. That is, man cannot perform a task in the world without himself being affected by that performance. Now, what does this mean for Covey, the Negro-breaker? His task is to mutilate the humanity of the slave. The question we must ask ourselves is whether he can perform that task without mutilating his own humanity. We ought to be able to infer, from the answer to this question, what happened to the humanity of the white man in general during the era of slavery. …the slave breaker lies, he is forced to lie, he is inhuman and is forced to be inhuman (Davis 1971, 20).
[vi] Yancy 2002, 310
[vii] Douglass & Davis, 52
[viii] Douglass & Davis, 52
[ix] Douglass & Davis, 56
[x] O’Byrn 2022, 31).
[xi] Russell 2019
[xii] Douglass & Davis, 59
[xiii] Douglas & Davis, 17
[xiv] Philosopher Lewis Gordon articulates the centrality of sociality to any account of bad faith that can be adequate to thinking about oppression. He writes: “Sociality is so much at the heart of human relations – indeed, their relationality, through which emerges their historicity – that we might as well add another definition of bad faith. Bad faith is the denial of sociality. Since bad faith is also a lie to the self, then to lie about sociality is always a self-lie” (Gordon 2000, 78). See Funez-Flores (2025) for a critique of Gordon’s use of Fanon.
[xv] On rehearsal as political see Maynard & Simpson, 2022
[xvi] Douglass & Davis, 77
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