In-itself-for-itself

The in-itself-for-itself is Sartre's name for the impossible ontological ideal that structures human existence as a perpetual, self-defeating project. In Sartrean ontology, being is split between two irreconcilable modes: the in-itself (en-soi) — the dense, self-coincident, non-relational being of things, which simply "is what it is" — and the for-itself (pour-soi) — the self-distancing, negating, temporalizing mode of consciousness, which is constitutively what it is not. The in-itself-for-itself designates the fantasy of a third term that would reunite these two modes: a being that would have the full positivity and self-sufficiency of the in-itself while also grounding itself through its own freedom, as the for-itself does. This would be, precisely, a God — a being that is causa sui, that is to itself its own foundation. Sartre's argument is that this synthesis is structurally impossible: the for-itself is constituted as lack, as a "pursued-pursuing" flight away from coincidence with itself, and any achieved coincidence with the in-itself would annihilate the very negativity that makes the for-itself what it is.

What makes this concept theoretically central is that the in-itself-for-itself is not merely an unachieved goal but the fundamental structure of human desire. Sartre argues that all desire — whether in love, sport, art, science, or play — is ultimately desire to be this impossible unity. Every concrete project is a particular mode of the project of being, a specific attempt to appropriate the in-itself while retaining freedom. This means human reality is always already in bad faith insofar as it pursues an ideal whose very structure condemns it to failure: the for-itself cannot cease to be a lack without ceasing to be. The circle of desire is closed not by satisfaction but by the perpetual re-ignition of the lack that constitutes the subject.

This concept appears twice in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological, and both occurrences are structurally pivotal: the first (p.362) in the analysis of being-for-others and the failure of love, the second (p.586) in the ontological grounding of existential psychoanalysis. In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, the in-itself-for-itself functions as the master-object of Desire and Lack in Sartre's system. Like the Lacanian objet petit a, which is not a positive entity but a void that "causes" desire, the in-itself-for-itself is the ideal whose structural impossibility is precisely what keeps desire in motion. Sartre's formulation anticipates the Lacanian insistence that desire is not directed at satisfaction but at its own perpetuation — that what is desired is the desire itself, not its object. The concept also deepens the account of Alienation: because the for-itself can only exist as lack and self-distance, it is always already alienated from the in-itself fullness it pursues, and this alienation is not contingent but ontological.

The concept also illuminates Being-for-others and Facticity in a specific way: the Other's Look, as analyzed at p.362, is the mechanism by which the for-itself's flight toward the in-itself-for-itself is arrested and fixed into facticity — the Other crystallizes the for-itself's freedom into a thing-like object. This connects to the Lacanian Gaze, which similarly functions as the point from which the subject is seen and thereby rendered opaque to itself. The Dialectics cross-reference is equally relevant: the relation between in-itself and for-itself is a dialectical opposition that, unlike Hegelian dialectics, Sartre explicitly refuses to sublate — the in-itself-for-itself remains an ideal, not an achieved synthesis, which aligns with Lacan's own critique of Hegelian dialectics as failing to account for the non-dialectizable remainder.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological OntologyJean-Paul Sartre · 1943 (p.586)

desire is determined as a desire to be a certain being, which is the in-itself-for-itself and whose existence is ideal.

The phrase "whose existence is ideal" is theoretically decisive: it signals that the in-itself-for-itself is not a real ontological possibility that merely happens to be unattained, but a structural ideal — an existence that can only be "had" as the impossible horizon of desire, making desire constitutively a desire of lack rather than a desire of fulfillment. The copula "is" in "desire is determined as" further marks this not as an empirical observation about some desires but as a universal ontological determination — all desire, in its very structure, is desire for this impossible unity.