JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

184Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsexistence temporalizes itself as freedom. As such I am necessarily a consciousness (of)freedom since nothing exists in consciousness except as the non-thetic consciousnessof existing. Thus my freedom is perpetually in question in my being; it is not a qualityadded on or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff of my being; and as inmy being, my being is in question, I must necessarily possess a certain comprehensionof freedom. It is this comprehension which we intend at present to make explicit.In our attempt to reach to the heart of freedom we may be helped by the fewobservations which we have made on the subject in the course of this work and whichwe must summarize here. In the first chapter we established the fact that if negationcomes into the world through human-reality, the latter must be a being who can realizea nihilating rupture with the world and with himself; and we established that thepermanent possibility of this rupture is the same as freedom. But on the other hand,we stated that this permanent possibility of nihilating what I am in the form of“having-been” implies for man a particular type of existence. We were able then todetermine by means of analyses like that of bad faith that human reality is its ownnothingness. For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is. Under theseconditions freedom can be nothing other than this nihilation. It is through this that thefor-itself escapes its being as its essence; it is through this that the for-itself is alwayssomething other than what can be said of it. For in the final analysis the For-itself isthe one which escapes this very denomination, the one which is already beyond thename which is given to it, beyond the property which is recognized in it. To say thatthe for-itself has to be what it is, to say that it is what it is not while not being whatit is, to say that in it existence precedes and conditions essence or inversely accordingto Hegel, that for it “Wesen ist was gewesen ist”—all this is to say one and the samething: to be aware that man is free. Indeed by the sole fact that I am conscious of thecauses which inspire my action, these causes are already transcendent objects for myconsciousness; they are outside. In vain shall I seek to catch hold of them; I escapethem by my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence,beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means thatno limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that weare not free to cease being free. To the extent that the for-itself wishes to hide its ownnothingness from itself and to incorporate the in-itself as its true node of being, it istrying also to hide its freedom from itself.The ultimate meaning of determinism is to establish within us an unbroken continuityof existence in itself. The motive conceived as a psychic act—i.e., as a full and givenreality—is, in the deterministic view, artienated without any break with the decisionand the act, both of which are equally conceived as psychic givens. The in-itself hasgot hold of all these “data”; the motive provokes the act as the physical cause its