DE Weekly: Situatedness, the Crowd, & the Limits of Freedom
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 28, 2026.
Situatedness, the Crowd, & the Limits of Freedom
Last week, I wrote about radical freedom in Existentialism: a facet of our human condition that gives us the ability to choose which actions we take in our lives, and which contributes, ultimately, to the outcomes of our lives. I wrote also about the anxiety of choice we all encounter as a result of this, and the despair that might follow.
Further, I described what “genuine” free will might mean for us as humans, and how to exercise it appropriately.
I mentioned two existentialist concepts I have covered extensively in past newsletters, but which deserve their own explanation as it relates to freedom and genuine free will: facticity and sedimentation.
Facticity meaning the unchosen, unchangeable characteristics our Self (such as height, our birthplace, our ethnicity), and sedimentation meaning the consequences and results of past choices that pile up like sediment, such as what we majored in in college, the career we spent a decade on, who we chose to marry, etc.
In brief, while we do, in fact, possess a radical freedom constituting our genuine free will to choose as we please in life, both facticity and sedimentation act as limiting factors on that personal will.
In other words, as Jean-Paul Sartre illustrated in myriad ways in his work, the free will of the Self is limited by the free will of the Other.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre wrote, “[T]he other is the hidden death of my possibilities.” By this, he meant that although we are free to choose as we see fit between one choice and another, our choices are always limited in some real way by the Other––whether that be another person, a situation, society, governing bodies, and the like.
This is not necessarily bad or necessarily good; it just is. And, there are those who wrote that this is this very mode of coexistence that grounds us personally with other people and leads to an authentic existence.
It is hard to live inauthentically, in bad faith, when there are others to reckon with: we are encouraged (by our limitations) to live authentically, in good faith.
This leads us to another existentialist concept I would like to introduce called situatedness.
Situatedness is an expression of the limits of our freedom. It means to explain how our freedom cannot be absolute because it is grounded; it is grounded within a specific context not of our own making that we cannot pierce.
Situatedness, in this way, is a part of the sedimentation that we have to deal with, as we were born into it. As an example, you cannot control the country or the city you were born in. If you were born into a bad neighborhood or a good one, into a time of peace or a time of war, that contributes to the situatedness of your present.
You do not lose your freedom as a result of your situatedness, but you are made to act within a “bounded freedom,” a concrete set of circumstances that limit your free will to choose whatever you might like to.
More important to realize, however, is that you do not lose your ability for self-making. Although your freedom might be limited by the Other, your ability as a Self to continue the ongoing process of forming your essence remains. You can make choices from where you are, and you still own them; you are never detached from your true, genuine free will in this sense.
This is why Sartre said that human life is always “self-making-in-a-situation.” Constraints always exist, there are always limits to our human will––but we can still give meaning to our choices by making them in spite of this.
The last existentialist concept I will introduce today is one related to all we have discussed thus far. It is a concept called the crowd.
Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian and philosopher, wrote, “the crowd is untruth.” He meant to say that the opinion of a crowd, that is, a collective mob, is what destroys our sense of personal opinions. In the process, any semblance of personal truths and personal responsibility for our unbound freedom disappears, too.
This is not a concept lost on most people today: when people join a crowd, they tend to adopt the views of the crowd in self-service. They stop thinking for themselves and, above all, stop acting for themselves.
Because a collection of Selfs is caught up together into a crowd, there is no Self left. Thus, no Self exists to take responsibility for the actions of the crowd, and no one is held responsible. What, then, happens to the genuine free will of the Selfs in the crowd?
It disappears. To join a crowd, in Kierkegaard’s view, is to abdicate one’s responsibility, to surrender one’s genuine free will as an individual human being.
And, if we know anything about Existentialism at this point, it’s that we are not to surrender our radical freedom, but exercise it. We are not to lay down and die at the anxiety of choice and the total responsibility we all have, we are to rebel and to act and to choose––to live.
There are always limits to our freedom. There are always constraints we must act within, roads we cannot take, and lives we cannot live.
That this is the case does not mean we cannot still live according to our essence, that we cannot make the most of our existence.
I’ve written before that there are some of us who lament that we were not born into another time, into another place, as another person. The fact is you are here now, and you are you. You are a Self with a life to live––a meaningful one.
Recognize the gift that is your genuine free will, make the choices before you, and live it.
“‘I wish I had never been born,’ she said. ‘What are we born for?’ ‘For infinite happiness,’ said the Spirit. ‘You can step out into it at any moment…’” –– C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Sorry this one was late. I missed my 5:00am publishing schedule for the first time in over two years. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner, to be honest. Hopefully I can start another undefeated streak starting…now.
For more content, follow @TheDailyExist on X. For other social links, click here.
I write this newsletter for free–I love sharing my thoughts with you all, and I’ll continue to do so for free. But if you like what I write and want to show your support, you can always click here to share a tip. Thanks for keeping me going–it’s much appreciated.