JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Being113Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is. These are the three characteristicswhich the preliminary examination of the phenomenon of being allows us to assign tothe being of phenomena. For the moment it is impossible to push our investigationfurther. This is not yet the examination of the in-itself—which is never anything butwhat it is— which will allow us to establish and to explain its relations with the foritself.Thus we have left “appearances” and have been led progressively to posit twotypes of being, the in-itself and the for-itself, concerning which we have as yet onlysuperficial and incomplete information. A multitude of questions remain unanswered:What is the ultimate meaning of these two types of being? For what reasons do theyboth belong to being in general? What is the meaning of that being which includeswithin itself these two radically separated regions of being? If idealism and realismboth fail to explain the relations which in fact unite these regions which in theory arewithout communication, what other solution can we find for this problem? And howcan the being of the phenomenon be transphenomenal?Immediate structures of the for-itselfI. Presence to self[. . .] Now the cogito never gives out anything other than what we ask of it. Descartesquestioned it concerning its functional aspect—“I doubt, I think. ”And because hewished to pass without a conducting thread from this functional aspect to existentialdialectic, he fell into the error of substance. Husserl, warned by this error, remainedtimidly on the plane of functional description. Due to this fact he never passedbeyond the pure description of the appearance as such; he has shut himself up insidethe cogito and deserves—in spite of his denial—to be called a phenomenalist ratherthan a phenomenologist. His phenomenalism at every moment borders on Kantianidealism. Heidegger, wishing to avoid that descriptive phenomenalism which leads tothe Megarian, antidialectic isolation of essences, begins with the existential analyticwithout going through the cogito. But since the Dasein has from the start been deprivedof the dimension of consciousness, it can never regain this dimension. Heideggerendows human reality with a self-understanding which he defines as an “ekstatic project”of its own possibilities. It is certainly not my intention to deny the existence ofthis project. But how could there be an understanding which would not in itself be theconsciousness (of) being understanding? This ekstatic character of human reality willlapse into a thing-like, blind in-itself unless it arises from the consciousness of ekstasis.