JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Being125In-itself and for-itself: metaphysical implicationsWe are finally in a position to form conclusions. [. . .] we discovered consciousness asan appeal to being, and we showed that the cogito refers immediately to a being-initselfwhich is the object of consciousness. But after our description of the In-itselfand the For-itself, it appeared to us difficult to establish a bond between them, and wefeared that we might fall into an insurmountable dualism. This dualism threatened usagain in another way. In fact to the extent that it can be said of the For-itself that it is,we found ourselves confronting two radically distinct modes of being: that of the Foritselfwhich has to be what it is—i.e., which is what it is not and which is not what itis—and that of the In-itself which is what it is. We asked then if the discovery of thesetwo types of being had resulted in establishing an hiatus which would divide Being (asa general category belonging to all existents) into two incommunicable regions, in eachone of which the notion of Being must be taken in an original and unique sense.Our research has enabled us to answer the first of these questions: the For-itselfand the In-itself are reunited by a synthetic connection which is nothing other than theFor-itself itself. The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the Initself;it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being. One may be reminded here of thatconvenient fiction by which certain popularizers are accustomed to illustrate theprinciple of the conservation of energy. If, they say, a single one of the atoms whichconstitute the universe were annihilated, there would result a catastrophe whichwould extend to the entire universe, and this would be, in particular, the end of theEarth and of the solar system. This metaphor can be of use to us here. The For-itselfis like a tiny nihilation which has its origin at the heart of Being; and this nihilation issufficient to cause a total upheaval to happen to the In-itself. This upheaval is theworld. The for-itself has no reality save that of being the nihilation of being. Its solequalification comes to it from the fact that it is the nihilation of an individual andparticular In-itself and not of a being in general. The For-itself is not nothingness ingeneral but a particular privation; it constitutes itself as the privation of this being.Therefore we have no business asking about the way in which the for-itself can beunited with the in-itself since the for-itself is in no way an autonomous substance. Asa nihilation it is made-to-be by the in-itself; as an internal negation it must by meansof the in-itself make known to itself what it is not and consequently what it has to be.If the cogito necessarily leads outside the self, if consciousness is a slippery slope onwhich one cannot take one’s stand without immediately finding oneself tipped outsideonto being-in-itself, this is because consciousness does not have by itself any sufficiencyof being as an absolute subjectivity; from the start it refers to the thing.