Sartrean Value

Sartrean Value, as theorised in Being and Nothingness, names the ontological ideal that haunts every act of the for-itself without ever being achievable: the impossible fusion of in-itself and for-itself, of existence and essence, of brute facticity and transparent consciousness. For Sartre, the for-itself is constitutively lacking — it is what it is not and is not what it is — and Value is the name for the target of that structural lack. It is not a moral or instrumental good but an ontological attractor: the ideal synthesis in which the for-itself would cease to be a perpetual flight from itself and would coincide with its own being, grounding itself rather than perpetually projecting beyond itself. Because such a coincidence would abolish the very nihilating movement that defines consciousness, Value is structurally unattainable — it is "the impossible but haunting ideal fusion of essence and existence."

Sartre's account of abstraction, quantity, space, and beauty all converge on this point: each is a mode of negation enacted by the for-itself's ekstatic temporality, and each asymptotically approaches but never reaches the stability of the in-itself. Beauty, in particular, is identified as the aesthetic face of Value — the moment at which a "this" (a perceptual existent) seems to fuse with its own transcendent essence, lending it the appearance of necessity. This revelation is always a "transcendent and ideal indication," a promise the world cannot keep, because the for-itself's very structure as temporal projection prevents any final resting point. Value is therefore the correlate of desire in Sartre's ontology: a horizon that recedes as the for-itself advances toward it, constitutive of the for-itself's motion rather than its destination.

In the source (jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological), Sartrean Value emerges at the junction of Sartre's ontology and his nascent aesthetics, functioning as the capstone of the for-itself's structure of lack. It cross-references several canonical concepts in illuminating ways. Most directly, it mirrors the Lacanian concept of Das Ding: both are impossible, structurally unreachable objects that organise the subject's/for-itself's movement without ever being possessed. Just as das Ding is an "excluded interior" around which desire circles, Sartrean Value is the lure the for-itself perpetually projects toward but can never actualise. The parallel extends to sublimation: Lacan's "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" rhymes with Sartre's aesthetics, in which beauty momentarily seems to fuse a contingent existent with its transcendent essence — an illusion of the Thing, not the Thing itself.

Sartrean Value also stands in complex tension with Desire as Lacan formulates it. For Lacan, desire is the structural effect of the subject's insertion into language and is constitutively unfulfillable; for Sartre, Value plays an analogous constitutive role at the ontological level — it is what the for-itself desires in every act, and its unattainability is not contingent but essential. However, where Lacanian desire is produced by the Other and mediated by language ($◊a), Sartrean Value is posited as an immanent telos of consciousness itself, reflecting Sartre's fundamentally different account of Consciousness as a self-transparent, self-grounding nothingness. This is precisely the position the Lacanian corpus contests: Lacan's decentring of consciousness as opaque and derivative stands against Sartre's ontology, and Sartrean Value is the point at which that disagreement is sharpest — it is the ideal of a consciousness that finally grounds itself, the very thing Lacan's barred subject ($) structurally cannot do. In relation to Fantasy, Sartrean Value occupies an analogous structural role as the frame that gives desire its coordinates, yet Sartre does not theorise it as a "screen" over a traumatic Real — for him, it is the Real of consciousness's own being, not a fiction.

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

This ideal we called the in-itself-for-itself or value... correlative with the indication of a fusion of the polymorphic negation with the abstract negation which is its meaning, there is to be revealed a transcendent and ideal indication—that of a fusion of the existing this with its essence to-come.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it identifies Value not as a content but as a structural "indication" — a transcendent pointer that is always yet-to-come — and because it names the precise logical form of the impossible: the fusion of "polymorphic negation" (the for-itself's fluid, ekstatic self-differentiation) with "abstract negation" (the fixed, conceptual essence), a fusion whose very terms are mutually exclusive. The phrase "essence to-come" captures the temporal paradox at the heart of Sartrean Value: essence is not given but always deferred, making Value an irreducibly futural and unrealisable horizon.