In-itself

Being-in-itself (être-en-soi) is Sartre's name for the ontological region of brute, opaque, self-coincident being. Its three axiomatic characteristics, stated formally in Being and Nothingness, are: being is, being is in-itself, and being is what it is. It is absolute positivity without internal negation, relation, or lack — a "plenitude" that cannot be touched by nothingness. It is uncreated, contingent, and wholly transparent to nothing, not even to itself; it has no interiority, no self-relation, and no temporal ekstasis. Precisely because it is fully self-identical, the very notion of "self" — which implies a reflexive duality — dissolves at its limit: "At the limit of coincidence with itself, the self vanishes to give place to identical being." The in-itself is not a thing hidden behind appearances but the transphenomenal being of phenomena themselves in their brute thereness.

The in-itself functions throughout Sartre's ontology as the structural foil and negative pole against which the for-itself (consciousness) is defined. The for-itself comes into being only by nihilating the in-itself — determining itself not to be it — and so the in-itself is "wholly present to the heart of consciousness as that which consciousness determines itself not to be." This dialectical role proliferates across multiple registers: the past is the in-itself the for-itself has surpassed and carries as facticity; the body is the nihilated in-itself perpetually reapprehended in every surpassing; the situation is the relation of being between the for-itself and the in-itself it nihilates; and the impossible ideal of both sincerity and bad faith is a mode of in-itself existence — to be what one is without internal distance. The for-itself's constitutive lack is precisely a lack of in-itself-style coincidence with itself, making the en-soi the unattainable telos of every human project and ultimately the fantasy content of the desire to be God.

The concept is introduced at the opening structural level of Being and Nothingness (unspecified period tag throughout the corpus, which draws entirely from this single major work) as one half of a fundamental ontological dyad. In the early sections — the phenomenological introduction and Part One — the in-itself receives its formal, scholastic definition: three synthetic axioms, the critique of Hegel's equation of Being and Nothingness, and the insistence that negation cannot touch the "nucleus" of being. Here the in-itself is primarily a regional ontology, establishing the conditions under which the for-itself can appear at all.

As the work proceeds into the analysis of the for-itself's internal structures (Parts Two and Three), the in-itself becomes increasingly dynamic in its theoretical role. It is no longer just the inert backdrop but the active structural counter-term for temporality, facticity, and the body. The past "is" the in-itself the for-itself has surpassed; the body is the nihilated in-itself that haunts every project; time's problem is precisely that the in-itself has only one dimension of being and so cannot account for temporal flow. The in-itself also enters the analysis of memory, where Sartre charges both Descartes and Bergson with inadvertently treating consciousness as in-itself — as a positivity incapable of internal relation to its own past.

In Part Four, treating freedom, action, and appropriation, the in-itself takes on an existential-practical dimension. It is the resistant facticity that makes doing possible ("to do is precisely to change what has no need of something other than itself in order to exist") and the object of appropriative desire — the dream of assimilating the in-itself without dissolving it, symbolized by the field of snow as "pure exteriority, radical spatiality … the in-itself which is only in-itself." The for-itself's fundamental project is described as the impossible wish to be an in-itself-for-itself — a self-grounding, self-coincident consciousness — which Sartre identifies as the structure of the desire to be God.

Because all 21 occurrences derive from a single source (the Barnes translation of Being and Nothingness, with Barnes's own introductory essay), there is no evolution across commentators or between primary and secondary literature in the strict sense. Barnes's introduction (occurrences 1–2) reads the concept through the lens of rationality and emotion, foregrounding the "coefficient of adversity" and the in-itself as what reason properly bridges — a slight pragmatic inflection absent from Sartre's own technical passages. This minor reframing is the closest the corpus comes to interpretive evolution.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown)

Being is in itself. Being is what it is. These are the three characteristics which the preliminary examination of the phenomenon of being allows us to assign to the being of phenomena.

This is the formal, axiomatic definition of the in-itself — the three synthetic principles that constitute its regional ontology and govern every subsequent use of the concept.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.14)

Negation can not touch the nucleus of being of Being, which is absolute plenitude and entire positivity.

Establishes the in-itself's absolute impermeability to nothingness, making it the structural ground against which the for-itself's nihilating movement must be understood.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.85)

The concrete, real in-itself is wholly present to the heart of consciousness as that which consciousness determines itself not to be.

Captures the paradoxical intimacy of the in-itself to consciousness: it is not external or distant but the permanent structural counter-term of every act of nihilation, the origin of transcendence.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.118)

The past is the in-itself which I am, but I am this in-itself as surpassed.

Demonstrates how the in-itself migrates from a formal ontological category into Sartre's theory of temporality: the past is identified with the en-soi as the dense, self-identical facticity the for-itself must be and yet is not.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.69)

The ideal of good faith (to believe what one believes) is, like that of sincerity (to be what one is), an ideal of being-in-itself.

Shows the ethical-existential valence of the in-itself: it is the impossible goal of both sincerity and bad faith, the fantasy of self-coincidence that consciousness structurally cannot achieve.

Field of snow as symbol of the in-itself (other)

Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.581). Sartre uses the image of snow — 'pure exteriority, radical spatiality … its undifferentiation, its monotony, and its whiteness manifest the absolute nudity of substance' — to concretize the in-itself as an object of appropriative desire. The skier/hunter's relationship to the snowfield illustrates the for-itself's impossible dream: to assimilate the in-itself (to track it, to possess it, to leave a mark on it) while it remains indifferent and self-identical.

The stone in the stomach of the ostrich / Jonah in the stomach of the whale (literature)

Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.581). Sartre invokes these mythological images as symbols of 'the digested indigestible' — the dream of non-destructive assimilation. They illustrate the for-itself's desire to incorporate the in-itself (to know it, possess it, make it part of oneself) without destroying its structure of radical self-identity, which is ultimately the impossible project of being God.

The young woman on a date who dissociates her body from her consciousness (case_study)

Cited by Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (page unknown). Though primarily an illustration of bad faith, the passage explicitly invokes the in-itself as the impossible ideal the young coquette implicitly pursues: by treating herself as pure transcendence (thereby evading facticity) or pure facticity (thereby evading transcendence), she gestures toward a mode of being — self-identical, unambiguous — that is only available to the in-itself, not to consciousness.

Within the corpus

no internal disagreements surface in the corpus for this concept

Across frameworks

vs Object Oriented Ontology

Lacanian: Sartre's in-itself is radically inaccessible to consciousness not because it withdraws (as in OOO) but because consciousness is constitutively defined by its nihilating flight from it. The in-itself has no hidden depths — it is absolute positivity, 'what it is' — but it is structurally unavailable to coincidence with the for-itself. The gap is on the side of consciousness, not of the object.

Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, Morton) holds that all objects, not just the human subject, withdraw from one another and from themselves. The in-itself, far from being fully transparent, would itself be a withdrawn object whose real qualities are never exhausted by any relation, including the relation to the for-itself. OOO democratizes withdrawal across all entities rather than reserving it for the gap between consciousness and world.

Fault line: For Sartre the in-itself is absolute plenitude with no hidden interior — opacity is its very completeness; for OOO, withdrawal is a universal ontological condition that affects things in their relations to each other, making the in-itself itself inexhaustible and relationally withdrawn.

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: Sartre treats the in-itself as ontologically prior and independent of any social or historical mediation; its brute thereness ('de trop') is a pre-social, pre-historical fact of contingency. Freedom's encounter with the in-itself is a matter of individual ontological structure, not of historically conditioned second nature or reification.

Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School critical theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukács) would insist that what appears as the brute facticity of the 'in-itself' — the coefficient of adversity, the resistance of the world — is itself always already mediated by historically specific relations of production and reification. What Sartre naturalizes as ontological structure is for critical theory a socially produced second nature whose apparent immovability mystifies its historical contingency.

Fault line: Sartre's in-itself is a transhistorical ontological category; critical theory insists that the experienced hardness of the factical world is a historical-social product, and that taking it as a bare ontological given forecloses the critique of the conditions that produce it.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: For Sartre, the in-itself is what sincerity impossibly aspires to: to simply be what one is, without internal distance. But this aspiration is structurally self-defeating — the for-itself can never achieve in-itself-style self-coincidence, and any project to do so generates bad faith. Human reality is defined by its ineliminable gap from itself.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Maslow, Rogers) posits self-actualization as the positive achievement of congruence between self-concept and experience — a kind of dynamic integration that is genuinely attainable. The gap between who one is and who one could be is not ontologically ineliminable but a developmental challenge that can be progressively overcome through growth, authenticity, and unconditional positive regard.

Fault line: Sartre regards the aspiration to full self-coincidence as an ideal proper only to things (the in-itself), not to consciousness, making it an ontological impossibility; humanistic psychology treats something structurally similar to that aspiration — integrated, congruent selfhood — as an empirical and therapeutic achievement.