JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

The self157Dasein. His goal is to show it immediately as care; that is, as escaping itself in theproject of self toward the possibilities which it is. It is this projection of the selfoutside the self which he calls “understanding” (Verstand) and which permits him toestablish human reality as being a “revealing-revealed.” But this attempt to show firstthe escape from self of the Dasein is going to encounter in turn insurmountabledifficulties; we cannot first suppress the dimension “consciousness,” not even if it isin order to re-establish it subsequently. Understanding has meaning only if it isconsciousness of understanding. My possibility can exist as my possibility only if itis my consciousness which escapes itself toward my possibility. Otherwise the wholesystem of being and its possibilities will fall into the unconscious—that is into the initself.Behold, we are thrown back again towards the cogito. We must make this ourpoint of departure. Can we extend it without losing the benefits of reflective evidence?What has the description of the for-itself revealed to us?First we have encountered a nihilation in which the being of the for-itself is affectedin its being. This revelation of nothingness did not seem to us to pass beyond thelimits of the cogito. But let us consider more closely.The for-itself can not sustain nihilation without determining itself as a lack ofbeing. This means that the nihilation does not coincide with a simple introduction ofemptiness into consciousness. An external being has not expelled the in-itself fromconsciousness; rather the for-itself is perpetually determining itself not to be the initself.This means that it can establish itself only in terms of the in-itself and againstthe in-itself. Thus since the nihilation is the nihilation of being, it represents theoriginal connection between the being of the for-itself and the being of the in-itself.The concrete, real in-itself is wholly present to the heart of consciousness as thatwhich consciousness determines itself not to be. The cogito must necessarily lead usto discover this total, out-of-reach presence of the in-itself. Of course the fact of thispresence will be the very transcendence of the for-itself. But it is precisely thenihilation which is the origin of transcendence conceived as the original bond betweenthe for-itself and the in-itself. Thus we catch a glimpse of a way of getting out of thecogito. We shall see later indeed that the profound meaning of the cogito is essentiallyto refer outside itself. But it is not yet time to describe this characteristic of the foritself.What our ontological description has immediately revealed is that this being isthe foundation of itself as a lack of being; that is, that it determines its being by meansof a being which it is not.Nevertheless there are many ways of not being and some of them do not touch theinner nature of the being which is not what it is not. If, for example, I say of an inkwellthat it is not a bird, the inkwell and the bird remain untouched by the negation. This is