JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Being107human existence and thus puts phenomenology back into the world. Forthis reason the philosophy of Being and Nothingness is existentialphenomenology.Sartre thinks there are fundamentally two manners of being: being-foritself(l’être-pour-soi) and being-in-itself (l’être-en-soi). Other modes of being,such as being-for-others, are parasitic on these. Roughly, being-for-itself issubjective being and being-in-itself is objective being. Being-for-itself is thekind of being that pertains to one’s own existence. Being-in-itself is themanner in which the world external to one’s own reality exists.More precisely, being-for-itself entails the existence of consciousness,and consciousness of itself. It is that present centre of conscious awarenessthat each of us finds him or herself to be. It is being in the sense of beingsomeone, the kind of being of which it makes sense to say ‘I am it’. Becausebeing-for-itself entails consciousness, it entails that directedness towardsthe world called ‘intentionality’ which consciousness entails. Being-for-itselfis partly constituted by presence to being-in-itself. It is what it is over andagainst the world.Being-for-itself possesses three existential structures: facticity, temporalityand transcendence. Facticity is the unchosen condition or situation of thefor-itself in which freedom is exercised. Temporality is the totality past, present,future, and transcendence is the controversial fact about being-for-itself:that it is what it is not and is not what it is. Sartre means that I am, in a sense,constantly projected towards the future in my free self-definition.Being for itself is free and entails a kind of lack or nothingness. Being-foritselfdoes not so much have choice as is choice. An essential part of myownmost ontology is my constant capacity to choose, no matter howunpleasant and constrained the choices available. I am a kind of nothingnessbecause there is nothing that I am independently of my self constitutionthrough those choices. My consciousness is a kind of interiorphenomenological space of non-being, surrounded by the plentitude of theworld.Being-in-itself is opaque, objective, inert and entails a massive fullnessor plentitude of being. Being-in-itself is uncreated, meaning that although itis, it never began to be and there is no cause and no reason for it to be.Being-in-itself is not subject to temporality because past, present and futurepertain uniquely to being-for-itself. (However, the human past is in-itself, not