The Concept of Being-in-itself and Being-For-Itself

1) Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology in 1943. Sartre develops a philosophical account to support his existentialism in the book, addressing topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of “nothingness,” psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.

Sartre discusses his rejection of Kant’s concept of noumenon in the introduction to Being and Nothingness. Kant was an idealist who believed that we have no direct way of perceiving the external world and that all we have access to are our ideas about it, including what our senses tell us. Kant distinguished between phenomena, which are our perceptions of things or how things appear to us, and noumena, which are things in and of themselves that we do not know about. Sartre contends, in contrast to Kant, that the appearance of a phenomenon is pure and absolute. The noumenon is not inaccessible; it simply does not exist. The only reality is what one sees. Sartre contends that the world can be viewed as an infinite series of finite appearances from this vantage point. This viewpoint eliminates several dualisms, most notably the duality that contrasts the inside and outside of an object. What we see is exactly what we get.

After abandoning the concept of the noumenon, Sartre outlines the binary distinction that dominates the rest of Being and Nothingness: the distinction between unconscious being (en-soi, being-in-itself) and conscious being (en-soi, being-in-itself) (pour-soi, being-for-itself). Being-in-itself is rigid, lacks the ability to change, and is unaware of its own existence. Being-for-itself is aware of its own consciousness, but it is also insufficient. This undefined, non-determined nature, according to Sartre, is what defines man. Because the for-itself (like man) lacks a predetermined essence, it must create itself from nothingness. Nothingness, according to Sartre, is the defining characteristic of the for-itself. A tree is a tree and has no ability to change or create its own existence. Man, on the other hand, creates himself through his actions in the world. Man, as an object-for-itself, must actuate his own being rather than simply being, as the object-in-itself does.

Sartre argues that only when confronted with the gaze of another can we become aware of ourselves as human beings. We do not become aware of our own presence until we are aware that we are being watched. The gaze of the other is objectifying in the sense that when one observes another person building a house, he or she sees that person as nothing more than a house builder. Sartre claims that we perceive ourselves as being perceived and thus come to objectify ourselves in the same way that we are objectified. As a result, the gaze of the other robs us of our inherent freedom and causes us to lose sight of our existence as a being-for-itself and instead learn to falsely self-identify as a being-in-itself.

Sartre expands on the for-itself as a being of agency, action, and creation, as well as a being devoid of concrete foundation, in the final segment of his argument. To escape its own nothingness, the for-itself strives to absorb or, in more profane terms, consume the in-itself. But, in the end, the in-itself can never be possessed. Just as the for-itself will never realize the union of for-itself and in-itself, the alien object will never be apprehended or devoured. As a result, at the end of Sartre’s polemic, an incredible sense of despair dominates the discussion, he is a nothingness, a lack, dehumanized by the other and deceived even by himself. Yet, Sartre repeatedly emphasizes, he is free, transcendent, consciousness, and he creates the world. Sartre does not attempt to answer definitively how to reconcile these two ostensibly irreconcilable descriptions of human ontology.

2) Description of Being-in-Itself:

Being-in-itself is also contrasted with being of persons in Sartrean existentialism, which he describes as a combination of, or vacillation or tension between, being-for-itself and being-for-others. Being-in-itself refers to objects in the outside world — a state of being that simply is. It is not conscious, so it is neither active nor passive, and it has no capacity for transcendence. This mode of being applies to inanimate objects but not to humans, who, according to Sartre, must always make a choice.

One of Sartre’s problems with human existence is the desire to achieve being-in-itself, which he describes as the desire to be God — this is a longing for complete control over one’s destiny and absolute identity, which can only be attained by achieving complete control over the destiny of all existence. One of the ways people fall into bad faith is through a desire to be God. This is illustrated by Sartre’s famous depiction of a man in a café who has applied himself to a portrayal of his role as a waiter. Sartre claims that the waiter believes he is a waiter (as in being-in-itself), which is impossible because he cannot be a waiter in the same way that an inkwell is an inkwell. He is primarily a man (being-for-itself), albeit one who happens to be working as a waiter – a man with no fixed nature or essence, constantly recreating himself. He is focusing on himself as being-in-itself rather than being-for-itself. Sartre would describe the waiter as “a being that is not what it is and is what it is not” because he is a human, a being-for-itself by nature. As a result, the waiter who acts as if he is a waiter at his core “is not what [he] is”- that is, he is not solely a waiter- and “is what [he] is not”- that is, he is many things other than a waiter. The man in this example is reducing himself to a “being-in-itself” in bad faith, by simply playing the part of a waiter.

3) Description of Being-For-Itself:

Sartre introduces the related truth that the being-for-itself only has meaning because of its perpetual foray into the unknown future. In other words, a man is not fundamentally what he may be described as now. For example, if he is a teacher, he is not a teacher in the same way that a rock is a rock as a being-in-itself. In reality, no matter how hard he tries to be an essence, man is never an essence. The way he interprets his past and predicts his future is a series of choices in and of itself. According to Sartre, even if an individual can be said to have a certain physical nature, such as a chair (e.g., “he is six feet tall, and the chair two”), the individual projects himself by ascribing meaning to, or taking meaning from, his concrete characteristics and thus negating them. The paradox here is fantastic. The for-itself, in order to become one with the in-itself, imposes its subjectivity on the objectivity of the other. The for-itself is consciousness, but when this consciousness questions its own being, the irreconcilable schism between the in-itself and the for-itself is confirmed.

Sartre explains that the for-itself, as a conscious being, recognizes what it is not: it is not a being-in-itself. The for-itself becomes what it is by becoming aware of what it is not: a nothingness, completely free in the world, with a blank canvas on which to create its being. He concludes that the for-itself is the being through which nothingness and lack enter the world, and thus the for-itself is a lack in and of itself. Its absence represents the unattainable synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself. Being-for-itself is defined by its awareness of not being in-itself. Knowing is a form of being in and of itself, even if it is only knowledge of what one is not and cannot be, rather than knowledge of what one is. Being as it truly is can never be known by a human, because to do so, one would have to be the thing itself. To understand a rock, we must first become the rock (and of course, the rock, as a being-in-itself, lacks consciousness). However, the being-for-itself intuitively perceives the world through what is not present. In this way, the being-for-itself, which is already completely free, gains the ability to imagine. Even if absolute beauty cannot be grasped, knowing it through its absence, as one feels the emptiness left by a departed loved one, is its own truth.

4) The difference between the two:

Sartre describes the nature of two types of being, being-in-itself (the being of things) and being-for-itself, based on an examination of the nature of phenomena. While being-in-itself can only be approximated by human beings, being-for-itself is the consciousness of being.

Perhaps the most essential feature of being is its inherent lack of differentiation and diversity. Being is the totality of existence, a meaningless mass of matter devoid of meaning, consciousness, or knowledge. Consciousness enters the world via the for-itself, bringing nothingness, negation, and difference to what was previously a complete whole of being. The world exists because of consciousness. There would be no objects, trees, rivers, or rocks without it: only being.

Consciousness is always intentional—that is, it is always aware of something. As a result, it imposes itself on being-in-itself, making consciousness the burden of the for-itself and all being. Similarly, the for-itself is always dependent on the in-itself for survival. In Sartre’s ontology, consciousness only knows what it is by knowing what it is not. Consciousness recognizes that it is not a being-in-itself and thus recognizes itself as a nothingness, a nihilation of being. Despite the fact that the for-itself is nothing, according to Sartre, it exists only in relation to being and thus is its own type of is.