For the
existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre there is nothing more important than
freedom. Love, for him, must be free love in the sense of free choice, both of
the lover and of the lover. According to him, the relationship we have with the
person we love and who loves us back cannot be a relationship of belonging in
the sense that a certain object belongs to us, partly because we do not belong
to the object in the same way that it belongs to us.
However,
Sartre's approach to love places him in a certain problem since real, practical
love is a relationship that can greatly limit our freedom and present demands
to us. Thus when Sartre refers to love he does not compare before his eyes some
ideal harmony of mutual complementarily but a difficult and challenging realm
of contrasts and conflicts. According to Sartre, the beloved person needs the
love of the spouse as well as the approval and recognition of the lover of his
choices to be who he is.
However,
when we accept the love of another person we risk becoming an object, a
particular object articulated in terms of belonging since we adapt ourselves to
the desires and expectations of the lover, which hurts our choices. Not only
that, the beloved person becomes dependent on love for him and does not want it
to end and for the loving person to leave him, not exactly a situation that can
be called "freedom". True freedom according to Sartre is also the
freedom to change, including the freedom to stop loving. That is why Sartre
sees love as an unstable and dangerous realm, a kind of "gamble" on
who we are. Sartre maps the dangers inherent in submissive love between sadism
and the seduced. Masochism according to Sartre is a submissive submission to
the expectations and desires of the lover and adapting himself to who he wants
us to be, while self-cancellation. Sadism is the treatment of the beloved as an
object that needs to be adapted to our needs.
Either way,
when we love we are required to compromise, compromise is one of the greatest
dangers to our freedom that is in constant tension with love. Sartre himself
tried to apply this concept in his personal life which included the non-binding
existence of several relationships in parallel, including with the important
thinker Simone de Beauvoir. A person who sanctifies freedom or another case of
fear of commitment? You decide.
See also: Sartre on Love and Freedom
