Mitsein (Being-With)

Mitsein (Being-With) as treated in Sartre's Being and Nothingness designates the experience of collective subjectivity — the "we" — but is given a strictly derivative and ontologically secondary status. Sartre's theoretical move is to deny Mitsein the foundational role Heidegger had assigned it: rather than being a primordial structure of Dasein, the "we" is shown to presuppose being-for-others as its necessary ground. The experience of "we-ness" — whether as We-as-subject (the acting, projecting collective) or Us-as-object (the collectivity constituted under another's Look) — is not a primitive fact about human existence but a particular experiential achievement that arises only on the foundation of the prior, irreducible structure of being-for-others. Being-With is thus ontologically parasitic: it can occur, but it cannot ground itself.

This demotion of Mitsein has a further implication that the passage underscores through the analysis of hate. Even the radical project of destroying the Other — which would seem to dissolve being-with — fails on its own terms, because being-for-others, once established, is irremediable. The being-with relation cannot be annihilated by eliminating the Other; it merely crystallizes as a fixed, past dimension of one's own being. The two forms of the "we" — subject-pole and object-pole — are thus not symmetrical or reconcilable variants of a single social bond but radically distinct modes, each rooted in the same ineliminable structure of being-for-others from which they both derive and which neither can escape.

Within the source jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological, Mitsein appears at a late, synthetic moment in the ontology of interpersonal relations, after the full analysis of being-for-others, the Look (Gaze), love, masochism, sadism, and hate. Its placement signals that Sartre has been building toward a critique of any philosophy — Heidegger's above all — that treats sociality or togetherness as ontologically primitive. By subordinating Mitsein to being-for-others, Sartre aligns collective experience with the broader structure of alienation: the "we" is not a haven from the alienating Look but a secondary formation that neither overcomes nor dissolves it.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Mitsein functions as a boundary concept that clarifies what being-for-others and alienation are not. Where alienation (in the Lacanian elaboration) names a structural, irremediable splitting of the subject through entry into the field of the Other, Sartre's point about Mitsein is structurally homologous: no communal "we" can heal or undo this splitting — the Us-as-object is precisely the moment when the collective itself is subjected to the alienating Look (the Gaze of a third party), demonstrating that even collective existence remains hostage to an exterior perspective. The Gaze, as the cross-referenced synthesis clarifies, is the objet a that "inculpates and splits" the subject; Sartre's Mitsein analysis shows that collectivities are equally exposed to this inculpating function. Mitsein is therefore best read as a specification and limit-test of being-for-others: it extends the logic of the Look into the social domain while confirming that no degree of "with-ness" can serve as a shelter from the fundamental asymmetry the Look installs.

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

The being-for-others precedes and founds the being-with-others... the 'we' is a certain particular experience which is produced in special cases on the foundation of being-for-others in general.

The key theoretical weight falls on the verb pair "precedes and founds": Sartre is making a strict ontological priority claim, not merely a temporal one, establishing that being-for-others is the condition of possibility — the ground — for any experience of "we," while "produced in special cases" marks the "we" as contingent and derivative rather than universal or primordial.