Being-for-itself - for-itself
ELI5
The "for-itself" is Sartre's way of saying that a conscious person is never just a fixed thing — you're always slipping away from any simple label or description of yourself. But when someone else looks at you and judges you, they treat you like a frozen object with a set identity, and that gap is what produces shame.
Definition
The "Being-for-itself / for-itself" as it appears in this Sartrean context designates the ontological mode of consciousness as pure nihilating activity — a mode of being that is never simply identical with itself, never a fixed, positive thing, but is instead constitutively self-negating and temporally ecstatic. In Sartre's phenomenological ontology, the for-itself (pour-soi) is the mode of being proper to consciousness: unlike the in-itself (en-soi), which simply is what it is (identity without negation, brute positivity), the for-itself is defined by its capacity to introduce nothingness into being — it "is what it is not and is not what it is." The for-itself can never coincide with itself, can never be pinned down as an object or quality, because its very being consists in perpetual flight from any fixed determination.
This concept is theoretically pivotal in the passage because it stages the contrast between the for-itself's constitutive non-coincidence with itself and the for-itself's experience of shame under the Other's look. When the Other looks at me and judges me as "evil," I am characterized as an in-itself — a fixed, thinglike quality is attributed to me. The Other's look thus performs a kind of ontological violence: it freezes the for-itself's fluid, self-negating mode of being into a frozen object-character. The Other is not just an epistemological problem but a trans-mundane transcendence that constitutes my being as objectness, wresting the for-itself from its proper mode of being and installing it in the mode of the in-itself — which is precisely what generates shame as the lived structure of this objectification.
Place in the corpus
This concept appears in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological (p.274) and functions as the ontological ground for Sartre's account of the Other's look and shame — both of which intersect with several canonical Lacanian concepts. The for-itself's structural non-coincidence with itself echoes the Lacanian concept of alienation: just as Lacan's split subject ($) can never coincide with the signifier that represents it, the Sartrean for-itself can never coincide with any positive determination. However, where Lacanian alienation is constituted by entry into the field of the Other (language, the signifying chain), Sartre's for-itself is self-alienating from within — its nothingness is intrinsic rather than structurally imposed from without. This marks a key divergence: for Lacan, the Other is the primary locus of alienation; for Sartre, the Other's look merely converts the for-itself's own internal non-being into an external, objectifying gaze.
The concept also intersects directly with the canonical treatment of the Gaze. The for-itself's objectification under the Other's look anticipates Lacan's account of the gaze as objet petit a — that which "looks back" and disrupts the subject's mastery of the visual field. But crucially, Sartre treats the Other's look as a full, inapprehensible trans-mundane transcendence that constitutes my shame, whereas Lacan disperses the gaze into a pre-subjective structural object, severing it from any actual Other's intentional act. Similarly, the concept connects to Shame (cross-referenced) as the lived experience of being-for-the-Other, and to Phenomenology as the broader methodological frame: the for-itself/in-itself distinction is precisely the kind of phenomenological ontology that Lacan systematically surpasses by insisting that consciousness is derivative of, and deceived by, the unconscious and the signifier.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (p.274)
I am in the mode of not being what I am and of being what I am not. The qualification 'evil,' on the contrary, characterizes me as an in-itself.
The phrase "mode of not being what I am and of being what I am not" is the canonical Sartrean formulation of the for-itself's constitutive non-self-identity, condensing the entire ontological distinction between pour-soi and en-soi into a single chiasmic structure; the contrast with the qualification "evil" — which "characterizes me as an in-itself" — then shows precisely how the Other's look collapses the for-itself's fluid self-negation into a fixed, thing-like predicate, making the ontological stakes of shame and objectification theoretically explicit.