I suppose the condemned to be free is not so much ontological but that there is no expert to answer our ethical questions, or perhaps more broadly than ethical, moral and even to some degree practical questions. How should I spend my time? for example.
Don’t remember it, only the waiter. But your take on the example seems fair.
I took Sartre to be positing a radical freedom, an ontological one that allows us to respond in various ways to what is determined. We, not being determined. Along the lines of what you said about Kant. I Think he actually coupled the for-itself with transcendence, but how I cannot remember. I do remember finding it odd. Kind of dehumanizing. I mean, i do understand the appeal of free will and how this would seem humanizing, but these Little dots of nothingness that can do anything (within physical laws) seems sort of empty, rather Buddhist, I now realize.
I was thinking of the existentialists in general in relation to Husserl. Perhaps not Merleau Ponty - he seems more neutral. But that they investigated in somewhat husserlian ways the predicament, as they saw it, of the self in the World - I suppose I could have added ‘post-Nietschze’ - god is dead etc. Not that Reading Husserl would help one understand, particularly, what the existentialists thought Life was like, but more that he presented a tool, or really a kind of permission to focus in a certain way, and they used it to describe and explore.