JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

128Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsthe insufficiency of being in the for-itself. The temporalization of consciousness is notan ascending progress toward the dignity of the causa sui; it is a surface run-off whoseorigin is, on the contrary, the impossibility of being a self-cause. Also the ens causa suiremains as the lacked, the indication of an impossible vertical surpassing which by itsvery non-existence conditions the flat movement of consciousness; in the same waythe vertical attraction which the moon exercises on the ocean has for its result thehorizontal displacement which is the tide. The second piece of information whichmetaphysics can draw from ontology is that the for-itself is effectively a perpetualproject of founding itself qua being and a perpetual failure of this project. Presence toitself with the various directions of its nihilation (the ekstatic nihilation of the threetemporal dimensions, the twin nihilation of the dyad reflected-reflecting) representsthe primary upsurge of this project; reflection represents the splitting of the projectwhich turns back on itself in order to found itself at least as a project, and theaggravation of the nihilating hiatus by the failure of this project itself. “Doing” and“having,” the cardinal categories of human reality, are immediately or mediately reducedto the project of being. Finally the plurality of both can be interpreted as humanreality’s final attempt to found itself, resulting in the radical separation of being andthe consciousness of being.Thus ontology teaches us two things: (1) If the in-itself were to found itself, itcould attempt to do so only by making itself consciousness; that is, the concept ofcausa sui includes within it that of presence to self— i.e., the nihilating decompressionof being; (2) Consciousness is in fact a project of founding itself; that is, of attaining tothe dignity of the in-itself-for-itself or in-itself-as-self-cause. But we can not deriveanything further from this. Nothing allows us to affirm on the ontological level that thenihilation of the in-itself in for-itself has for its meaning—from the start and at thevery heart of the in-itself—the project of being its own self-cause. Quite the contrary.Ontology here comes up against a profound contradiction since it is through the foritselfthat the possibility of a foundation comes to the world. In order to be a projectof founding itself, the in-itself would of necessity have to be originally a presence toitself—i.e., it would have to be already consciousness. Ontology will therefore limititself to declaring that everything takes place as if the in-itself in a project to founditself gave itself the modification of the for-itself. It is up to metaphysics to form thehypotheses which will allow us to conceive of this process as the absolute event whichcomes to crown the individual venture which is the existence of being. It is evident thatthese hypotheses will remain hypotheses since we can not expect either furthervalidation or invalidation. What will make their validity is only the possibility which