Reason and Radical Freedom

In this episode

The connection

Carbonized scrolls pulled from the ash of Mount Vesuvius, described in a Smithsonian Magazine piece from late June, suggest that human beings possess an innate pull toward the good. These 2,000-year-old fragments argue that reason acts as a built-in compass, a natural guide for living well. But a different perspective appears in an essay for Aeon published just yesterday. There, Skye C Cleary examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s conviction that there is no pre-existing blueprint for a life. Something interesting emerges in the tension between them. One view finds security in a universal natural order, while the other suggests that the heavy burden of freedom only begins when the compass is gone.

The first piece leaves the listener with a sense of relief—the idea that a natural inclination toward goodness is baked into the human mind. The writer suggests that virtue isn't something people have to invent from scratch, but something discovered through reason, acting as a reliable anchor that survived even the ash of Vesuvius. But moving from those ancient fragments to the crowded Paris lecture hall described by Skye C Cleary, that anchor vanishes. Where the Stoic treatise points to an innate blueprint for how to live, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that the most defining characteristic of being human is the total absence of one. The interesting thing is how these two perspectives treat the weight of a choice. For the Stoics, acting on reason is a way to align with a larger, rational order—a source of stability. For Sartre, the fact that there’s no pre-existing order to align with is exactly what creates the "anguish" he describes. Read alongside the ancient scrolls, Sartre’s insistence that existence precedes essence starts to look less like a rejection of morality and more like a radical expansion of responsibility. If there’s no natural map for distinguishing good from evil, then every choice becomes a heavy, solitary act of creation.

Stoic fragments suggest that virtue is a seed already planted within, waiting for reason to water it. Sartre counters this by stripping away the soil entirely, leaving nothing but the raw act of choosing. What’s left is the friction between finding a direction and the burden of inventing one. That silence, where a guide used to be, is where the work begins. If the universe doesn’t provide the map, what is the first thing a person should look for to find their way?