JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Being127But this immediately gives rise to a metaphysical interrogation. The upsurge of thefor-itself starting from the in-itself is in no way comparable to the dialectical genesisof the Platonic Other starting from being. “Being” and “other” are, for Plato, genera.But we, on the contrary, have seen that being is an individual venture. Similarly theappearance of the for-itself is the absolute event which comes to being. There istherefore room here for a metaphysical problem which could be formulated thus: Whydoes the for-itself arise in terms of being? We, indeed, apply the term “metaphysical”to the study of individual processes which have given birth to this world as a concreteand particular totality. In this sense metaphysics is to ontology as history is tosociology. We have seen that it would be absurd to ask why being is other, that thequestion can have meaning only within the limits of a for-itself and that it evensupposes the ontological priority of nothingness over being. It can be posited only ifcombined with another question which is externally analogous and yet very different:Why is it that there is being? But we know now that we must carefully distinguishbetween these two questions. The first is devoid of meaning: all the “Whys” in fact aresubsequent to being and presuppose it. Being is without reason, without cause, andwithout necessity; the very definition of being releases to us its original contingency.To the second question we have already replied, for it is not posited on the metaphysicallevel but on that of ontology: “There is” being because the for-itself is such that thereis being. The character of a phenomenon comes to being through the for-itself.But while questions on the origin of being or on the origin of the world are eitherdevoid of meaning or receive a reply within the actual province of ontology, the caseis not the same for the origin of the for-itself. The for-itself is such that it has the rightto turn back on itself toward its own origin. The being by which the “Why” comes intobeing has the right to posit its own “Why” since it is itself an interrogation, a “Why.”To this question ontology can not reply, for the problem here is to explain an event,not to describe the structures of a being. At most it can point out that the nothingnesswhich is made-to-be by the in-itself is not a simple emptiness devoid of meaning. Themeaning of the nothingness of the nihilation is to-be-made-to-be in order to foundbeing. Ontology furnishes us two pieces of information which serve as the basis formetaphysics: first, that every process of a foundation of the self is a rupture in theidentity-of-being of the in-itself, a withdrawal by being in relation to itself and theappearance of presence to self or consciousness. It is only by making itself for-itselfthat being can aspire to be the cause of itself. Consciousness as the nihilation of beingappears therefore as one stage in a progression toward the immanence of causality—i.e., toward being a self-cause. The progression, however, stops there as the result of