JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

108Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsfor-itself, because it is fixed and unalterable.) Being-in-itself is undifferentiated,solid and opaque to itself and filled with itself. Sartre sums up theseascriptions in the quasi-tautological thought: it is what it is. In being-in-itselfthere is no difference between its being and its being what it is. Existenceand essence coincide.Sartre thinks all being is contingent. Whatever is might not have been.Whatever is might not have been what it is. As Roquentin realises in Nausea,there might not have been any conscious beings including oneself. Theremight not have been anything. That there is something rather than nothingis a fact that could have been otherwise. That there is what there is ratherthan something else is a fact that could have been otherwise. Humanityseeks to evade its contingency in the inauthentic denial of freedom called‘bad faith’ described in Chapter 11 below. Sartre thinks that the fundamentalhuman aspiration is to be a synthesis of being-for-itself and being-in-itself,the perpetually frustrated aspiration, in fact, to be God.In order to appreciate Sartre’s distinctions between manners of being, inthe passages from Being and Nothingness which follow, it is necessary topay close and direct attention to one’s own existence and the surroundingworld. It is not possible to understand them by thinking in any abstract,objective, or quasi-scientific way. They are entailed by phenomenologicaldescriptions, not theories.BEING AND NOTHINGNESSBeing-in-itselfWe can now form a few definite conclusions about the phenomenon of being, whichwe have considered in order to make the preceding observations. Consciousness is therevealed-revelation of existents, and existents appear before consciousness on thefoundation of their being. Nevertheless the primary characteristic of the being of anexistent is never to reveal itself completely to consciousness. An existent can not bestripped of its being; being is the ever present foundation of the existent; it is everywherein it and nowhere. There is no being which is not the being of a certain mode ofbeing, none which can not be apprehended through the mode of being which manifestsbeing and veils it at the same time. Consciousness can always pass beyond theexistent, not toward its being, but toward the meaning of this being. That is why we