Transcendence (Sartrean)
ELI5
Transcendence here means that you — and every other person — are never just a fixed "thing": you're always reaching beyond what you are right now toward what you're doing or becoming, and no one can ever completely pin you down, not even yourself.
Definition
Transcendence (Sartrean) names the ontological structure by which the For-itself — consciousness as pure nihilating negativity — is constitutively "beyond" any fixed determination, any given state, any in-itself. It is not a property the For-itself possesses among others but its very mode of being: "a being which is originally a project," whose existence is always already ahead of itself, organized toward ends that it freely posits rather than receiving from without. Because the For-itself never simply "is" what it is — it is always surpassing its facticity toward possibilities — transcendence is coextensive with freedom and with temporalization. Causes, motives, and deliberate acts of will are all "announced" retrospectively by a project that has already been freely taken up at the level of original spontaneity; freedom is not an episode within existence but the ontological fabric of the For-itself's self-negating being.
The concept carries a second, relational valence that is equally fundamental: transcendence names the irreducible opacity of the Other's freedom to my appropriative project. In the context of desire and the caress, I can never fully capture the Other because the Other's consciousness is always already exceeding any bodily or psychic objectification I attempt. The Other's "characteristic is to be transcendent to the world" — that is, no sooner do I grasp the Other as flesh, as a "psychic object in the midst of the world," than the Other's freedom slips away from that objectification. This structural frustration is not contingent failure but a necessary consequence of the fact that two transcendences cannot be collapsed into one: "double reciprocal incarnation" is the asymptotic ideal that desire ceaselessly pursues and structurally cannot achieve.
Place in the corpus
Both occurrences of Transcendence (Sartrean) appear in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological, where it operates as a load-bearing ontological term that ties together several major Sartrean concepts synthesized elsewhere in the corpus. It stands in direct structural tension with Facticity: transcendence is the movement of surpassing, while facticity is the brute givenness being surpassed — together they constitute the "situation," the irreducible milieu of human freedom. The concept is equally central to Being-for-others: being-for-others arises precisely because the Other's transcendence cannot be neutralized by my Look or my desire; the Other always exceeds the object I make of them, just as I exceed the object the Other makes of me. This mutual, asymmetrical irreducibility of two transcendences is the engine of Sartrean intersubjectivity.
In relation to Desire and the Caress (Sartrean), transcendence explains the structural failure of erotic appropriation: the caress aims at double reciprocal incarnation — making both bodies present to each other as pure flesh — but the Other's transcendence (freedom) perpetually escapes the incarnation I seek to induce. This connects, by analogy, to the Lacanian concept of Anxiety, insofar as both frameworks identify a point at which the Other's irreducible opacity generates an affective impasse — though where Lacan locates anxiety in the proximity of the object a (a piece of the Real), Sartre locates it in the ontological impossibility of fully capturing the Other's freedom. Transcendence is therefore not a peripheral term but the conceptual hinge connecting Sartrean freedom, desire, intersubjectivity, and the constitutive failure of all attempts at total possession of the Other.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (p.453)
by being transcendence—i.e., not something which would first be in order subsequently to put itself into relation with this or that end, but on the contrary, a being which is originally a project
The phrase "originally a project" is theoretically loaded because it collapses the distinction between existence and projection: the For-itself does not first exist and then project, which means transcendence is not an act but the very ontological structure of the For-itself. The contrast with "something which would first be in order subsequently" directly refutes any essentialist or causal account of freedom, making transcendence synonymous with the For-itself's self-constituting temporality.