On Sartre's View of Human Freedom

On Sartre’s View of Human Freedom — by John Deverell

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Introduction

It is widely assumed that human identity is determined by biological,

psychological and social causes. Jean-Paul Sartre asserts instead that the

fundamental reality of the human being is independent of forces in the world.

“Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence of

the human being is suspended in his freedom. What we call freedom is

impossible to distinguish from the being of ‘human reality’.” (Sartre 1993, 113)

That is, even though our daily existence is immersed in conditions given by

circumstance, the inmost spark of consciousness, the “instantaneous nucleus” of

the human being (Sartre 1993, 186), is able from moment to moment to freely

decide how it will respond to “opportunities and chances” (Sartre 1993, 68) as

they emerge. There is no essential self which pre-determines the outcome on

each occasion on which we apply our decision-making power.

This is a theory which refutes not only psychological determinism of the

materialist, scientific kind but also the religious idea that we possess an essential

nature given by God. Sartre tries to make sense of the human situation in a

Godless universe. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” (Sartre

1993, 36) In conducting our lives our task is not to become that which God

intends for us, but to make up who we are as we go along. God does not exist, so

“… all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with

Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and

perfect consciousness to think it.” (Sartre 1993, 40-41) And, “… I’m quite vexed

that that’s the way it is; but if I’ve decided to discard God the Father, there has to

be someone to invent values.” (Sartre 1993, 60)

In Sartre’s thought, however, such a position does not lead to ethical

neutrality, wherein all goals are equally acceptable. He offers a justification for

valuing some things more than others that is rooted in the human world, with

reference to human solidarity, and paradoxically circumscribed to some extent

by freedom itself, as he conceives it, which makes demands of truthfulness,

authenticity, and respect for the freedom of others.


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Sartre’s depiction of the human condition, to me is highly illuminating. It

exposes the presence of a primal mystery at the heart of human existence and

draws out implications which highlight the responsibilities inherent in our

situation as well as the great range of potentialities that lie within us. In this

essay I want to defend the basic structure supporting human freedom that Sartre

has identified but at the end recast it in a revised form compatible with belief in

God.

Sartre on human freedom

In a scientific light it appears that human beings are not free, in that science

conceives of people as objects conditioned by causal laws. Sartre establishes the

foundation of human freedom beyond the reach of causality by uncovering the

“human reality” of an individual as a subject instead of an object. He achieves

this as follows. His philosophical strategy is similar to that of Immanuel Kant,

but removes Kant’s demarcation between phenomenal and noumenal worlds.

Kant made a space for freedom by supposing that a mysterious world

independent of causality must exist beyond the world as directly experienced by

intuition1 and explained by the sciences. It is not clear on Kant’s reckoning how

freedom can be united with consciousness, since his noumenal world is beyond

the reach of intuition. There is a gap that is not explained.

Sartre, by contrast with Kant, finds the origin of freedom in a location

that can be identified by intuition, albeit only just graspable. This location he

calls the “pre-reflective cogito”. Here, being is conscious of objects presented to

its perception but not reflexively conscious as a self that is conscious of itself.

That such a level of consciousness must exist is deduced from the observation

that prior to the reflective consciousness, exemplified in Descartes statement, “I

think therefore I am”, there must be a consciousness that discerns objects outside

itself without having yet thought of itself as an object. This pre-reflective

1 Philosophical definition of intuition from dictionary.com — (a) an immediate cognition of an

object not inferred or determined by a previous cognition of the same object. (b) any object or truth so discerned. (c) pure, untaught, noninferential knowledge.


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consciousness flickers at the edges of everyday awareness. During intense focus

on an activity, the mind is not occupied with consciousness of itself, but with the

activity at hand. However, upon being interrupted and asked what one is doing,

suddenly one is aware that “I was counting”, or whatever. (See Wicks 21) This

demonstrates that somehow pre-reflective consciousness is aware that it is

conscious, even while not “watching itself”. Further, as soon as consciousness

turns its attention away from some outer object and toward itself, it makes of

itself an object. This object, consciousness as it is in its own reflection, per

Descartes, cannot be the fundamental level of consciousness. The irreducible

subject, then, which is the human presence in the world, resides even deeper than

the self-conscious “I” of the ego. It must be identified with pre-reflective

consciousness.

Note that scientific method overall confirms its models inductively by

means of probabilities. Bearing this in mind the following statement of Sartre’s

shows the primacy of subjectivity to science:

Every theory which takes man out of the moment in which he becomes aware of

himself is, at its very beginning, a theory which confounds the truth, for outside

the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable, and a doctrine of probability

which is not bound to a truth dissolves into thin air. In order to describe the

probable you must have a firm hold on the true. Therefore, before there can be

any truth whatsoever, there must be an absolute truth; and this one is simple

and easily arrived at; it’s on everyone’s doorstep; it’s a matter of grasping it

directly. (Sartre 1993, 51)

The implication motivating Sartre here is spelled out in his next

paragraph: “The effect of all materialism is to treat every man, including the one

philosophizing, as an object, that is, as an ensemble of determined reactions in

no way distinguished from the ensemble of qualities and phenomena which

constitute a table or a chair or a stone. We definitely wish to establish the human

realm as an ensemble of values distinct from the material realm.” (Sartre 1993,

51)

The irreducible conscious subject is at the core of human existence,

before anything particular can be said to identify who we essentially are, and so


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Sartre says, as previously quoted: “Human freedom precedes essence in man and

makes it possible; the essence of the human being is suspended in his freedom.

What we call freedom is impossible to distinguish from the being of ‘human

reality’.” (Sartre 1993, 113) As I understand it, the point here is that the

properties of the human being that identify the human “essence” (in Aristotle’s

terms) are properties of our objectively knowable selves in the world, whereas

the subjective knower cannot be ascribed any properties at all, for properties are

a projection of knowing. The knower comes before the known. The idea that

existence precedes essence is further explained by Sartre:

It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only

afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is

indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be

something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no

human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he

conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this

thrust toward existence. (Sartre 1993, 35-36)

It would be foolish to suppose that inherent freedom allows an individual

to be or become absolutely anything at will and Sartre does not claim it. For a

start, “each person is an absolute upsurge at an absolute date and is perfectly

unthinkable at another date.” (Sartre 1993, 66) Freedom is exercised in relation

to the opportunities that arise in the particular situations that come with being

alive at that “absolute date”. “Our being is immediately ‘in situation’; that is, it

arises in enterprises and knows itself first insofar as it is reflected in those

enterprises. We discover ourselves then in a world peopled with demands, in the

heart of projects ‘in the course of realization’.” (Sartre 1993, 135)

The circumstances constituting the facts of our individual lives define us

as “objects” in the world. This objective aspect Sartre calls our “facticity”. On

the other hand “transcendence” is the domain of our free reality as subjects.

Thomas Flynn comments: “Given the fundamental division of the human

situation into facticity and transcendence, bad faith or inauthenticity can assume

two principal forms: one that denies the freedom or transcendence component (’I


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can't do anything about it’) and the other that ignores the factical dimension of

every situation (‘I can do anything by just wishing it’). The former is the more

prevalent form of self-deception but the latter is common to people who lack a

sense of the real in their lives.” (Flynn 2011)

The process of creating ourselves requires that we make choices but

since there is no higher authority than ourselves there is an arbitrary element in

moral choice. (See Sartre 1993, 56 and 58) Arbitrary it may be in a sense, but not

“pure caprice”, for “man is in an organized situation in which he himself is

involved. Through his choice, he involves all mankind, and he cannot avoid

making a choice …” (Sartre 1993, 54) I interpret this to mean that since human

nature is not defined for us in advance, it is up to us to define it, and in every

choice that we make we are adding to the collective edifice of human identity

built up over time (as well as our own personal identities). But the edifice is

rather fragile. Sartre is disinclined to rely greatly on his fellows. “Tomorrow,

after my death, some men may decide to set up Fascism, and the others may be

cowardly and muddled enough to let them do it. Fascism will then be the human

reality, so much the worse for us.”

Our essence, in the sense of a definition of who we are, belongs to the

past. “Essence is all that human reality apprehends in itself as having been.”

Transcendence beckons from the future; “… man first of all is the being who

hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as

being in the future”. (Sartre 1993, 36)

Sartre likens the process of ethical decision-making to the work of an

artist in creating a painting. He suggests that there is no such painting as

definitely the right one that the artist should create. The artist establishes the

value of the painting in the act of creating it. With ethics: “We are in the same

creative situation. We never say that a work of art is arbitrary. When we speak of

a canvas of Picasso, we never say it is arbitrary; we understand quite well that he

was making himself what he is at the very time he was painting, that the

ensemble of his work is embodied in his life.” (Sartre 1993, 55) By acting, we


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establish the value of our acts.

All the same, there is a factor which deeply colours the process, namely

the importance of freedom itself, for “the ultimate meaning of the acts of honest

men is the quest for freedom as such.” (Sartre 1993, 57) Flynn writes: “Sartre

sometimes talks as if any choice could be authentic so long as it is lived with a

clear awareness of its contingency and responsibility. But his considered opinion

excludes choices that oppress or consciously exploit others. In other words,

authenticity is not entirely style; there is a general content and that content is

freedom. Thus the ‘authentic Nazi’ is explicitly disqualified as being

oxymoronic.” (Flynn 2011)

Freedom is the inmost reality of humankind but if we fail to exercise our

freedom, succumbing to bad faith instead, we will not realize freedom’s

potentiality in the concrete performance of our lives, thus allowing ourselves to

wallow in the condition of objects under control of external forces rather than

free subjects.

As an upshot of the whole structure in which humans find ourselves,

inevitably we are afflicted by anguish. This is because the acute responsibility of

forever having to define ourselves anew, if we do not dishonestly avoid it,

weighs on us heavily. We have been “thrown” into this position by the fact of

having been born. Just exactly who we might think we are at any given moment

is a convenient illusion. Previous patterns of exemplary behaviour may crumble;

or we may suddenly find our feet and go in a better direction. “What the

existentialist says is that the coward makes himself cowardly, that the hero

makes himself heroic. There’s always a possibility for the coward not to be

cowardly any more and for the hero to stop being heroic.” (Sartre 1993, 50) We

have to be on our mettle then. That is the existential challenge.

David Rose on the pre-reflective cogito

There are ways of interpreting Sartre other than that summarised above, but the

present interpretation, centred on the primacy of the pre-reflective cogito outside


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the bounds of causality, is broadly confirmed by David Rose. He makes this

point in contention against Mary Warnock, who he says does not see it this way.

“Warnock understands Sartre's for-itself as an essence like the Cartesian cogito,

when it should most properly be understood as an existence. She commits an

ontological error when she assumes that the original project is an account of

human nature as a ‘what’. If the human being is a ‘what’, a thing present-at-hand,

then one can apply the category of causality to it and the paradox of freedom

arises. However, Satre is describing the ‘who’, the fundamental way in which

human-being exists in the world.” (Rose 2003, 9)

Rose begins his discussion by positioning Sartre as a “libertarian” in

contrast to the determinist and the compatibilist. The determinist view, which I

alluded to in the opening sentence of this essay, “holds that the human being is a

physical object like all others, subject to the physical laws of the universe and,

once all the laws are known and the initial conditions revealed, the human being

is as predictable in his or her behaviour as a billiard ball.” The compatibilist

agrees about causation but regards freedom as liberation from restrictions on

fulfilling one’s desires. “Sartre is the proper name most commonly associated

with the position of the libertarian as he rejects any deterministic theory of action

and, equally he does not accept compatibilism: if freedom means uncaused, to

describe freedom as acting on one's desires without impediment is to say one's

action is caused by a desire or a personality trait. To be free is to reject all

possible explanations of knowing, doing or being which refer to something prior

to and external to consciousness.” (Rose 2003, 2)

As I previously stated and Rose affirms, the pre-reflective cogito is the

locus of freedom. Rose shows how Sartre begins with Descartes’ cogito and then

modifies it, drawing on insights from Martin Heidegger. What Sartre gets out of

“I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) is that everything begins from the

subjective. Rose writes: “For there to be phenomena, one must be experiencing

and if one is experiencing, one exists. This is a familiar transcendental argument

that, for Sartre, proves that if there is consciousness, then there must exist a


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pre-reflective cogito, which is conscious of being conscious of x.” (Rose 2003, 7)

While Kant discerned the a priori unity of consciousness in the subject, it was

Heidegger’s move to locate the unified subject ontologically prior to knowledge.

“The modes of being Sartre describes [being-in-itself and being-for-itself] are

derived from this approach.” (Rose 2003, 7)

The difficulty for Sartre is connecting the utterly free consciousness with

an individual person living in the world. His solution is “… continuity over time:

this series of acts is ‘me’” (Rose 2003, 4) And: “There has to exist an a priori

unity of consciousness, otherwise this particular moment of consciousness

would be impossible, and this a priori unity makes possible the empirical,

synthetic unity that is me in the world.” (Rose 2003, 9)

In the end Rose concludes that Sartre is not in fact a simple libertarian.

The self is an ongoing project formed by “my” acts. Through action of the self in

the world, the “isolated metaphysical freedom” (Rose 2003, 13) of pure

consciousness connects somehow with the humdrum realities of the causal

matrix in the presence of other consciousnesses. Freedom is self determination

achieved through wrestling with the exigencies of life and other people. “Only

within a social context, that is the actual structures of being-for-others, can

freedom be meaningful rather than absurd.”

Richard Creel on God as the guarantor of human freedom

Richard Creel’s position on human nature is markedly different from Sartre’s

and he appears not to understand the primacy of the pre-reflective cogito on the

same terms that Rose does. Although he accepts Sartre’s point that the human

being has no pre-defined essence, he holds that “there is an essence which man

might choose in his freedom…” (Creel 1984, 285). However, he continues,

“Sartre denies that there is such an essence, declaring that man is a ‘futile

passion’; theism holds that there is such an essence, writ on the hearts of men

and declared through revelation.” (Creel 1984, 285). On the other hand,

“According to theism as well as Sartre, man does not have an inherent essence


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which determines his behaviour in the sense that other creatures and things have

determining essences.” (Creel 1984, 285) And: “It appears, then, that if there is a

God, God would have created people without an essence in the sense that Sartre

says people have no essence. But does Sartre have an argument/or belief in the

existence of freedom?” (Creel 1984, 286)

Creel wants to show that God is the true guarantor of freedom and that it

is therefore contradictory of Sartre to try to uphold freedom while denying God.

“Theism affirms that freedom exists first in God — who is free from all

dependence and who is free to actualize any possibility consistent with his

goodness.” (Creel 1984, 289) If one is a believer in Judaism, Christianity, or

Islam, the Divine foundation of freedom is confirmed by Scripture, and

furthermore, “if one feels he is free and believes he has been created by a God

who could have created him free, then - since God is not a deceiver — he has a

reason to trust his feeling of freedom.” By contrast, Creel regards Sartre’s

attempt at positing the grounds of freedom elsewhere than in God as mere

speculation unsupported by evidence.

The inductive evidence favours determinism, not libertarianism, in two respects.

First, it seems obvious that by far most of the processes of nature are causally

and lawfully determined. Consequently, in so far as man is obviously a part of

the natural scheme of things, it would seem a matter of special pleading to

make an exception of man with regard to determinism for no other reason than

that he feels free or would like to think he is. Second, progress with regard to the

understanding and prediction of primate behaviour has been made and

continues to be made. To be sure, the progress is slight at this time, but it

appears to be statistically significant and there is no empirical reason to assume

that it will not continue. For both these reasons the inductive evidence favours

determinism, and I know of no countervailing inductive evidence upon which the

libertarian can build a case. Consequently, one who would justify libertarianism

rather than hold it on faith, must do so deductively, that is, by means of some

major premise which overrides the inductive arguments. So far as I can conjure,

there is no premise which the atheist could hold consistently and from which he

could deduce a defence of libertarianism. Hence, the atheist is limited by his

own world view to being a rational determinist or an irrational libertarian. (Creel

1984, 290)

And:


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The inductive evidence does the theist no more good than it does the atheist, of

course. It leans where it leans, but there is a crucial difference. The theist has a

reason for thinking that the incompleteness of our ability to predict human

behaviour is due not to the youth of the behavioural sciences but to the nature

of man, who is made in the image of God. (Creel 1984, 290)

Hans Grelland on intentionality and the act of perception

An aspect of Sartre’s thought which Hans Grelland brings out is the role of

ontological freedom in enabling us to choose not only our acts but our very

perceptions by which we constitute the meaning of our acts in the first place. He

also expounds Sartre’s related idea of the “project”, which is the overall aim that

a person is working for with each act that they commit.

Grelland traces to Husserl, Sartre’s concept of “constitution”, whereby

we shape our own perceptions during the act of perception, and goes on to say:

“This freedom, this power of influencing the appearance of the perceived object,

is, … essentially the freedom expressed in Sartre’s philosophy.” (Grelland 2006,

22) The perceiving consciousness always directs its attention towards an object

in which it has some intentional interest. The intention involved helps to shape

the way that perceptions are constituted. The subject is therefore not just a

passive recipient of impressions but a participant in the process of perception

who exercises “a certain interpretive freedom.” (Grelland 22) Where Husserl

was mostly interested in “the observing and thinking subject” (Grelland 2006,

27), Sartre focused much more on the acting subject. “To Sartre the conscious

subject is certainly intentional, as in Husserl, but it is also something that exists

through its projects, and a project is essentially the same as an intention.”

(Grelland 2006, 28) Actions “point beyond” themselves in seeking to achieve

the aims of the relevant projects or overcome some lack which the act intends to

remedy.

Evaluation of the commentators’ views

I share the perspective presented by Rose and the concluding part of my essay


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will rely on his conclusions. My reasoning there will implicitly support his view.

Likewise with Grelland.

Creel’s argument is essentially an inductive argument for determinism,

modified by possible evidence on the other side that God wishes to grant

freedom to human beings. He entertains the hypothesis that perhaps not all

events in the world are caused, if there is a transcendently free God, who wants

to break the circuit in some cases, such as when humans are making decisions.

Without a free God to break the circuit, all that is left is the operation of causal

operations of natural law. What Creel doesn’t seem to appreciate is that Sartre

posits the foundation of human freedom outside the circuit. Sartre, I think would

agree that events in the world are caused, whereas human decisions are not

events in the world but events in the subject. Sartre therefore shows how

freedom is possible and in fact necessary to human existence.

In Creel’s favour, perhaps Sartre is not so clear about how decisions can

be events in the mind of a physical being, constituted of the operation of brain

mechanisms (trying to avoid anachronism in my phrasing here), while also in

some sense not events in the world. My answer to this would be that an analysis

that reduces decision making to the firing of neurons (in today’s terms), is an

objective construction rather than subjective, and does not defeat Sartre’s point

that all thought begins in the subjective realm.

Creel’s argument falls into confusion over just how there can be a human

nature that is equivalent to the image of God “writ on the hearts of men” (Creel

1984, 285) while at the same time does not determine human behaviour. He does

not say where in the structure of human being this non-determining but

choosable human nature can be found. Sartre says that we create human nature

on the fly but Creel implies that we select it from some part of ourselves that

cannot be within the core of our existence (for he says he agrees that existence

precedes essence), and yet is so fundamental as to be written on our hearts. By

pushing human nature into no-man’s land, neither here nor there, he opens the

door to determinism, which he proceeds to defend very well, without providing


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us with anywhere to escape from its exigencies. He wants to show that God’s

freedom guarantees human freedom, but he does not show where in the structure

of human being, God has put the capacity for freedom. The result is that God

might well be free, but this is of no consequence to human beings. Conversely,

Sartre would say that he has deduced human freedom from the structure of

human existence, and this obtains whether or not there is a God. (See Sartre 1993,

62)

My reply to Creel’s theistic argument for free-will ironically amounts to

a defense of Sartre against determinism.

However, I agree with Creel that God makes a “contribution”, not as a

circuit-breaker but as the originator of existence, whose apophatic nothingness

lies behind the nothingness of original consciousness in the human realm. I will

develop this idea in the last part of the essay.

Conclusion

We began with Sartre’s claim that original consciousness is freedom, and we

have seen that a coherent account of the human situation can be built on this

foundation. Pre-reflective consciousness is freedom because it “upsurges” prior

to anything in the world that could control it. Belief in God can be consistent

with Sartre’s account if the image of the Divine Being in humanity is considered

as both the origin and destination of human existence: its Alpha and Omega. The

following is an attempt to reconfigure Sartre’s system on theistic lines.

In the structure of existence, the human being’s unknowable origin is

an “empty” consciousness, a nothingness; while the unattainable destination is

to become one with the plenitude of all things. Humanity neither remembers its

origin nor has a real hope of attaining its destination; our story starts forever in

the midst of action. On the journey from origin to destination, we continually

have to make choices. Freedom is the necessity of having to make choices. My

identifiable “self” at any one moment is constituted of the choices I have made

up to this point, plus an indefinable element from the new choice in front of me


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in the present moment.

The meaning of true freedom is to escape from inertness as a mere object

and become an active subject. To achieve this requires that I subjugate all

limiting forces that would make of me an object. So, paradoxically, freedom

may be used up, diminished, exhausted, by freely choosing to succumb to

objectifying forces. But freedom used in submission to self-expansive demands

increases freedom. Limiting forces are those deterministic influences of nature

and social conditioning which would drag us down. Expansive demands are the

attractions exerted by virtues, talents and opportunities for union with others, as

yet unrealized.

For Sartre, God is an unwanted authority who preordains that I shall

fulfill my identity in a fixed way, or not at all. This understanding of God is not

necessary. God may be conceived to supply both the nothingness of my origin

and the allness of my destination. The commandments of God need not be seen

as impositions on freedom but as invitations to strive for a greater abundance of

life, i.e. greater freedom from the chains of natural causation. As the purpose of

obedience to God’s commands is to expand in virtues and powers, although

appearing to constrain, religious submission is the opposite of constraint. Rather,

it is the same as the process of discipline whereby arts and crafts are learned,

turning inept novices into virtuosos of control over their media of expression.

It is indeed strange that humanity has the capacity to choose this or that.

This is the capacity of a being which is a nothingness at the start and only

gradually becomes somebody. In our biological existence we have a nature

conferred by evolution, but in our human existence we are what we make of

ourselves, and the possibilities, in principle, are limitless. The limitlessness of

our possibilities reflects the limitlessness of the Creator who bestows those

possibilities. That we can reach out for them in freedom is due to the fact that we

are freedom, as Sartre says.

Now, I submit that if original consciousness is freedom, it is also faith,

for it appears to believe directly in its primary intuitions, unconditioned by any


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reason (deductive or inferential) for so believing. If this is right, then we should

combine faith into the structure that Sartre has proposed in his statement

mentioned earlier that “the ultimate meaning of the acts of honest men is the

quest for freedom as such.” (Sartre 1993, 57) We will have to say that the

meaning of the acts of honest persons is also the quest for faith as such. Faith at

this point in my argument refers simply to confidence in one’s perceptions.

As Grelland has shown, not only what we do but also what we believe,

how we grasp hold of the world with our minds, is in a profound sense a matter

of choice. This, too, implies to me that faith and freedom are inextricably

intermingled. To be human is to live between the poles of the nothingness of

absolute freedom and the universe-of-everything towards which freedom desires

to expand, through its projects. Faith, or in other words, intentionality, links

those two poles, in combination with freedom.

Human reality proves its freedom when it believes a falsehood. It proves

its faith by believing in a truth. This situation arises from the structure of

consciousness which ensures no amount of empirical evidence can determine the

ultimate question as to why evidence is even required in the first place. Evidence

is needed to justify belief because of the possibility of being mistaken. That

possibility in turn exists because the knowing consciousness is not mapped to

the world in an automatic correspondence. The correspondence being not

automatic, inherently consciousness is free to believe as it chooses. But from the

possibility of there being any correspondence at all, and because confidence in a

sufficiency of correspondence for practical purposes is the everyday assumption

of a normal human life, consciousness has faith. Consciousness finds evidence

through faith in its perceptions. Evidence does not find consciousness.

Faith, or consciousness, reaches out mirror-like from the receptivity of

nothingness towards its intentional objects, and in this way, “the end is in the

beginning”. The ultimate intentional object is thought of in religion as God, the

ultimate, never attainable, Truth. This connection is suppressed in Sartre’s

writings, but present in the margins. With that marginal comment, I break off


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this intervention in an unending discourse.

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On Sartre's View of Human Freedom