Bad Faith or Perfect Freedom

The kind of freedom affirmed and promoted by Sartre is sometimes called “negative freedom,” where one is free from something – in Sartre’s case, the restrictive professional and cultural expectations of the French academy. In contemporary philosophy, this sense of freedom is often juxtaposed with so-called “positive freedom,” where one is said to be free to do something, especially freedom to pursue goodness and flourishing. Although the distinction between these two ways of thinking about freedom is often associated with Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” it can be traced back to Augustine’s early treatise On the Free Choice of the Will.