Being-for-War: Freedom and the Fragility of the Shared World

Lior Levy (University of Haifa, University of Melbourne)

Being-for-War: Freedom and the Fragility of the Shared World

Lior Levy (University of Melbourne)

Abstract: What does war reveal about existential freedom? Sartre’s philosophy is often read as an account of radical freedom: consciousness is never reducible to its situation, and human beings remain responsible for what they make of the conditions in which they find themselves. Yet war presents a distinctive challenge to this conception of freedom. It does not simply impose constraints upon an otherwise intact freedom; it transforms the world in which possibilities can appear, alter the meanings of things and actions, and reorganise the relations through which freedom is exercised. What war threatens, then, is not only the subject’s freedom, but the shared world that makes meaningful agency possible in the first place.

I develop the concept of "being-for-war" to describe a mode of existence in which subjects are implicated in a world they neither wholly choose nor simply passively endure. In “being-for-war” freedom discloses not only the possibility of world-creation, but also the possibility of its unmaking. Drawing primarily on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and War Diaries, I examine the ethical and political implications of being-for-war. War makes visible a feature of freedom that remains less apparent in conditions of relative stability: freedom is fragile because the world of possibilities within which we act is shared, contingent, and vulnerable to collective destruction. An ethics of being-for-war must therefore attend not only to what individuals choose, but to how their actions sustain, reproduce, transform, or foreclose the possibilities of a shared world.

Bio: Lior Levy is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on existentialism, phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and aesthetics. She is the author of articles on Sartre, Beauvoir, feminist phenomenology, and co-editor (with Massimo Leone) of Masks and Faces (Routledge, 2026).

Zoom Link: https://deakin.zoom.us/j/87951496688?pwd=ukkb27R7x3J57huab6yLfVYlfB64gl.1

Meeting ID: 879 5149 6688 // Password: 74986849

This meeting is at 12:30pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) 2 March 2027 [02:30am UTC 2 March 2027]