Responsibility

Sartre's moral imperative is about choosing, not about what gets chosen: no code says which option is right, and declining to decide is itself a decision one answers for.

In its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object.

Put simply Sartre: the commonest way of lying to ourselves is to plead that we had no choice, blaming fate, the laws of nature or "the way I am". That denies our freedom and treats us as mere things.

Anguish is the price of responsibility: whoever commits to anything settles not only who they will be but, in effect, legislates for all humanity. Absolute freedom means absolute responsibility.

Put simply Sartre: whenever we commit to something, we choose not only who we will be but, in effect, set a rule for all humanity. Total freedom means total responsibility, and that weight is our anguish.

Sartre's anguish is a little different from Heidegger's angst: less connected with finitude and mortality, more with responsibility, the burden of choosing for all mankind.

Put simply Shore: Heidegger's dread ("angst") is tied to mortality and the fact that we will die. Sartre's anguish is tied instead to responsibility: the burden of choosing for all mankind.

Some situations admit no innocent choice: the wartime young man deciding whether to leave his sick mother for the Resistance has no clean option, yet must still decide.

Put simply Sartre: sometimes every option does harm. His example is a young man in wartime choosing between staying with his sick mother and joining the Resistance. No choice is clean, yet he must still choose.

In the text In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), Sartre's pupil must choose between staying with his mother, who lives only for him, and "going to England to join the Free French Forces."

Kołakowski argued in a 1966 Warsaw University lecture that Poland's regime worked by negative selection: the worst people, those without conscience or responsibility, were the ones promoted to power.

Havel's greengrocer is not powerless, which makes him answerable and so guilty: it is people like him whose compliance keeps the game going.

Put simply Havel: the greengrocer, an ordinary shopkeeper who displays a communist slogan he does not believe, is not powerless. That makes him responsible, and so guilty, because people like him keep the system going.

In the text In "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), section VI, Havel writes that "Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt", and that rulers and ruled are both unfree.

The line dividing victims from oppressors runs through every individual: each person, in a fashion of their own, is at once the system's victim and its supporter.

Put simply Havel: the line between victims and oppressors runs through each person. Everyone, in their own way, both suffers under the system and helps hold it up.

Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as holding that robust subjectivity grounds truth instead of relativizing it, linked through responsibility; subjectivity becomes a key word for Havel.

Put simply Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as saying that a robust personal standpoint ("subjectivity") grounds truth rather than making it merely relative. Responsibility connects truth and subjectivity, and the word becomes key for Havel.

Addressing the US Congress in 1990, Havel inverted Marx: "consciousness precedes being," meaning that individual responsibility comes first and transcends any socioeconomic conditions.

Put simply Havel to the US Congress in 1990, reversing Marx: "consciousness precedes being." Individual responsibility comes first, he meant, and stands above any economic or social conditions.

In Heidegger's call for decision in everything and responsibility in every action, Shore hears existentialist motifs, decisionism and answerability, surfacing in his 1933 address as rector.

Put simply Shore hears existentialist themes in Heidegger's 1933 rector's speech. His call for decision in everything and responsibility in every act echoes the existentialist stress on choosing and answering for one's choices.

Michalski found Heidegger like a portrait whose eyes track you wherever you stand: the thinker who, in some ways ironically, made each step feel weighty and life a responsibility.

To be in the world from the outset is to be responsible for it from the outset; that responsibility goes everywhere with Dasein, an ontological trait, not a contingent tie.

Put simply Patočka: because we find ourselves in the world from the start, we are responsible for it from the start. That responsibility goes everywhere with us; it is part of what a human being is, not a chance tie.