Angela Davis’s existentially demanding freedom

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…