Being-in-itself-for-itself

Being-in-itself-for-itself names the impossible ontological ideal that structures the for-itself's (human consciousness's) fundamental project, as theorized by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. The for-itself is the mode of being that is not what it is and is what it is not — it is pure negativity, lack, nothingness — while the in-itself is the mode of brute, self-identical, opaque being that simply is what it is. Being-in-itself-for-itself would be the impossible synthesis of these two modes: a consciousness that is also fully self-grounding, self-coincident being, a for-itself that has successfully become the foundation of its own existence. Sartre equates this ideal explicitly with the concept of God — a being that is both free, self-aware consciousness and the solid plenitude of uncaused, necessary existence. Because the for-itself is constituted precisely as a lack of being, every project it undertakes — including possession, love, and creative activity — is at bottom a failed attempt to achieve this impossible totality.

Possession is the privileged site where this impossible project is most concretely legible. To possess an object is not merely to use or enjoy it but to absorb it into the for-itself's being in such a way that the for-itself experiences itself as the ground of a chunk of the in-itself. Through the possessed object, the for-itself tries to feel itself as the foundation of the world — a concrete, embodied totality that is simultaneously free and fully real. But this project is necessarily self-defeating: the for-itself can never coincide with itself or with being; the synthesis always collapses back into the gap. Being-in-itself-for-itself thus functions less as an achievable state than as the constitutive horizon — the lure — around which all human desire and all existential projects orbit.

This concept appears in the source jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological (p. 597), within Sartre's account of existential psychoanalysis and the ontology of having. It functions as the telos — always deferred and structurally unreachable — of the for-itself's fundamental project of being. In this sense it stands as the source's most compressed formulation of what drives all human striving, and it directly organizes the argument that "to be" and "to have" are not separate desires but two expressions of the same ontological lack.

The concept intersects productively with several of the cross-referenced canonicals. Its closest analogue is Desire (Lacanian sense): both concepts identify a constitutive lack as the engine of all motivated activity, both insist that the "object" of desire is not a positive entity but a void or impossible synthesis, and both frame this structure as unfulfillable by design rather than by accident — the for-itself's project of becoming in-itself-for-itself maps closely onto Lacanian desire's endless circling around das Ding. Lack is the shared ontological substrate: the for-itself is lack, and being-in-itself-for-itself is what lack "aims at" without ever reaching. Fantasy offers another resonance: just as Lacanian fantasy ($◊a) frames and sustains desire without resolving it, the ideal of being-in-itself-for-itself frames and sustains the for-itself's projects without ever being attained. Existential Psychoanalysis (also cross-referenced) is precisely the method Sartre proposes for deciphering, through empirical projects and preferences, the individual's original choice of being — i.e., the specific shape each person gives to this impossible universal project. The concept is thus the ontological foundation on which existential psychoanalysis rests its interpretive practice.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.597)

every possessive project aims at constituting the For-itself as the foundation of the world or a concrete totality of the in-itself, and this totality is, as totality, the for-itself itself existing in the mode of the in-itself

The quote is theoretically loaded because it collapses the distinction between subject and world: "the for-itself itself existing in the mode of the in-itself" is precisely the impossible synthesis — consciousness trying to become the kind of dense, self-grounding being it can only ever lack — while "foundation of the world" signals that possession is not an empirical relation to things but an ontological bid for self-grounding totality.