Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology

by Jean-Paul Sartre, Hazel Barnes (2011)

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Synopsis

Being and Nothingness (1943, English translation by Hazel Barnes, 1956/2011) is Sartre's systematic phenomenological ontology that attempts to resolve the classical dualisms of idealism and realism by establishing two irreducible but asymmetric regions of being: the in-itself (être-en-soi), the dense, self-identical fullness of non-conscious existence, and the for-itself (être-pour-soi), the nihilating, self-distancing structure of consciousness that is constitutively "not what it is and is what it is not." The argument's central move is to identify consciousness with nothingness: the for-itself has no substantial being of its own but exists only as the nihilation of the in-itself, and this negativity is the source of differentiation, meaning, freedom, and the world. From this ontological foundation Sartre derives, in sequence: the origin of negation and the phenomenon of anguish as consciousness's apprehension of its own freedom; the structures of bad faith as the attempt to flee that freedom by identifying with the in-itself; the full ontology of the for-itself across presence-to-self, value, temporality, and transcendence; the encounter with the Other through the Look, which constitutes the for-itself as a being-for-others and introduces alienation into its very structure; the body as the facticity that the for-itself "exists" without being able to objectify; and finally the dimensions of freedom-in-situation and the project of existential psychoanalysis, which aims to decode the individual's original choice of being. The book culminates in the claim that all human projects are variations on the impossible desire to become the ens causa sui — the self-causing, God-like fusion of in-itself and for-itself — and that this impossibility renders every human endeavor an expression of a "useless passion," though the final pages gesture toward an ethics of authentic freedom that Sartre deferred to a later work.

Distinctive contribution

Being and Nothingness occupies a unique position in the Lacanian secondary corpus because it provides the most systematic and internally consistent pre-Lacanian phenomenological account of the constitutive role of negativity, lack, and the Other in the structure of subjectivity. Where Lacan draws on Hegel's dialectic of recognition (master/slave, desire as desire of the Other's desire), Sartre independently arrives at cognate results through a purely ontological analysis: the for-itself is structurally a lack-of-being, its desire is desire-of-being, and the encounter with the Other through the Look produces an irreversible alienation of the subject's freedom into objecthood. The Sartrean Look (le regard) prefigures the Lacanian gaze in crucial respects — it is not a perceptual event but an ontological one that constitutes the subject as an object and introduces a dimension of being that escapes the for-itself entirely — but Sartre locates this structure at the level of intersubjectivity rather than the drive-apparatus, and insists on the subject's radical freedom to reverse the look rather than accepting the constitutive asymmetry of the scopic drive that Lacan inherits from Freud. Sartre's critique of the Freudian unconscious and the censor (chunks 23–24) is particularly significant for Lacanian readers: Sartre argues that the censor must itself be "in bad faith" because it must know what it represses while pretending not to know, and he concludes that the Freudian apparatus merely displaces rather than resolves the fundamental paradox of self-deception. This critique is precisely the target against which Lacan reconstructs the unconscious as structured like a language, radically exterior to any self-transparent consciousness. Reading Sartre against and alongside Lacan thus clarifies what Lacanian theory retains, radicalizes, and overturns from the existentialist tradition: it retains the primacy of lack and the Other; it radicalizes the opacity of the subject to itself by making the unconscious irreducible rather than a displaced bad faith; and it overturns Sartrean radical freedom by showing that the subject is not the transparent foundation of its own project but is constituted in and through a symbolic order that precedes it.

Main themes

• Consciousness as nothingness and the nihilation of the in-itself
• Bad faith as the flight from freedom and the attempt to coincide with the in-itself
• The Look and the constitution of the subject as object-for-others
• Lack as the ontological structure of desire and the impossible project of self-causation
• Freedom-in-situation: facticity, transcendence, and the original choice of self
• Temporality as the ekstatic structure of the for-itself across past, present, and future
• Being-for-others, alienation, and the conflict of transcendences
• The body as lived facticity and as objectified being-for-others
• Existential psychoanalysis and the fundamental project of being
• The critique of Freudian unconscious and the unity of consciousness in bad faith

Chapter outline

• Translator's Introduction (Hazel E. Barnes)
• Introduction: The Pursuit of Being
• Part One, Chapter One: The Origin of Negation
• Part One, Chapter Two: Bad Faith
• Part Two, Chapter One: Immediate Structures of the For-Itself
• Part Two, Chapter Two: Temporality
• Part Two, Chapter Three: Transcendence
• Part Three, Chapter One: The Existence of Others
• Part Three, Chapter Two: The Body
• Part Three, Chapter Three: Concrete Relations with Others
• Part Four, Chapter One: Being and Doing — Freedom
• Part Four, Chapter Two: Doing and Having — Existential Psychoanalysis and Possession
• Conclusion: Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself, and Metaphysical Implications

Chapter summaries

Translator's Introduction (Hazel E. Barnes)

Barnes's extended introduction maps the architecture of Sartre's phenomenological ontology and situates it in relation to his earlier works (The Transcendence of the Ego, The Psychology of the Imagination, The Emotions, Nausea). She identifies the most startling thesis — that consciousness is a Nothingness — as the unifying motif of the entire work, while carefully distinguishing Sartre's position from both idealism and realism: without consciousness there is no world or differentiation, yet being is not dependent on consciousness for its existence; it is simply already there as transphenomenal fullness. Barnes traces the consequences: the Ego is not 'in' consciousness but is a transcendent object constituted by reflection; emotion is a magical transformation of the world rather than an inner state; and consciousness is always particular without being personal.

The introduction also surveys Sartre's treatment of God, freedom, and ethics. God is impossible on Sartre's ontology because the ens causa sui — the idea of a being that is both in-itself and for-itself, its own foundation — is structurally contradictory. The human condition is defined by the perpetual attempt to achieve this impossible ideal, rendering existence an ultimately 'useless passion.' Barnes draws out the quasi-theological structure underlying the secular ontology — questions of creation, freedom, guilt, contingency, and necessity all reappear under phenomenological description — and notes that Sartre reverses the mystical hierarchy: the non-rational original choice of being is made first, and reason is the preferred mode of being that freedom can then choose.

Barnes also summarizes Sartre's treatment of the body, sexuality, and being-for-others as the structural conditions for all inter-human relations, and notes that the For-itself's radical freedom grounds an ethics that Sartre promises but does not deliver within the text. Her introduction effectively serves as a scholarly companion that foregrounds the systematic ambition of the work and identifies its central problems, including the tension between radical freedom and the weight of facticity and the Other's look.

Key concepts: Consciousness as Nothingness, For-itself / In-itself, Transphenomenal being, Bad faith, Existential psychoanalysis, Freedom and facticity Notable examples: Nausea (La Nausée); Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego; T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party

Introduction: The Pursuit of Being

Sartre's own introduction poses the question of being by examining the structure of phenomena after Husserl's reduction of the existent to its series of appearances. He argues that this move overcomes old dualisms (being/appearance, essence/existence, potency/act) but generates a new fundamental dualism of the finite and the infinite: any appearance of a phenomenon implies an inexhaustible series of appearances, raising the question of the being of appearing as such. The being of phenomena cannot be identified with the phenomenon of being (contra Berkeley's esse est percipi), because being is the transphenomenal condition of all revelation rather than itself a revealed content.

Sartre then establishes the pre-reflective cogito as the ontological ground of all positional consciousness. Every consciousness-of-something is, at the same time, a non-positional consciousness of itself, without this self-consciousness being an additional act of reflection. This yields an 'absolute of existence' rather than of knowledge — a consciousness that is its own being without being its own foundation — and it is this structure that grounds what Sartre calls the 'ontological proof': because consciousness is constitutively intentional, it implies a transphenomenal being (the in-itself) that is not reducible to the percipi. The introduction closes with the axiomatic description of being-in-itself: being is, it is in-itself, it is what it is — a region of being characterized by the complete absence of any relation, any negativity, any distance from itself.

Key concepts: Phenomenology, Pre-reflective cogito, Transphenomenal being, Being-in-itself, Intentionality, Appearance Notable examples: Husserl's eidetic reduction; Berkeley's esse est percipi; Heidegger's pre-ontological comprehension of being

Part One, Chapter One: The Origin of Negation

Sartre opens Part One by arguing that the question of the connection between the two regions of being (in-itself and for-itself) requires not logical deduction but examination of the concrete act of questioning itself. Questioning is a pre-judicative relation to being that already contains a comprehension of non-being: to ask is to be prepared for a disclosure of nothingness. Negation is therefore not merely a quality of judgment but an ontological structure of the real, revealed through interrogation, destruction, absence, and distance — all examples of what Sartre calls négatités, realities whose positive structure contains non-being as a necessary condition.

Sartre critically examines and rejects two prior attempts to ground nothingness: Hegel's dialectical treatment, which equates being and nothingness as equally abstract and requires their synthesis in Becoming, but does not explain what being must be in order to constitute itself as negative; and Heidegger's account, which treats nothingness as the intentional correlate of Dasein's transcendence in anguish. Sartre agrees with Heidegger that nothingness is not a logical abstraction but must be given in concrete human attitudes, but argues that Heidegger does not adequately explain what being must be to support this revelation of nothingness — he posits nothingness as outside being rather than recognizing it as intrinsic to the for-itself's structure.

The chapter's decisive move is the argument that nothingness is not given prior to or outside of being but 'lies coiled in the heart of being — like a worm.' The being that nihilates itself is human reality (consciousness/freedom): the for-itself is the being by which nothingness comes to the world, and it does so by being its own nothingness — a nihilating cleavage between its present and its past that is the structure of both freedom and anguish. Anguish is therefore not an occasional mood but the reflective apprehension of freedom itself: the recognition that no motive, no past self, no essence determines the act, that the for-itself is always separated from what it is by a nothingness. Everyday life is structured by flight from this anguish through 'guard rails' — alarm clocks, social roles, the 'spirit of seriousness' — but such flight can never finally succeed because to flee anguish one must already know what one flees.

Key concepts: Negation, Nothingness, Anguish, Freedom, Négatités, Facticity Notable examples: The gambler who must renew his resolution; The man at the edge of a precipice; Hegel's Logic on Being and Non-Being; Heidegger's Dasein and anguish

Part One, Chapter Two: Bad Faith

Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre's central existential category for the structure by which consciousness attempts to flee its own freedom by treating itself as an in-itself. He carefully distinguishes it from ordinary lying: the liar deceives the Other while remaining in full possession of the truth, whereas in bad faith the deceiver and the deceived are one and the same consciousness. This identity is possible because consciousness is constitutively 'not what it is and is what it is not' — it is never fully coincident with itself, always exceeding or falling short of any fixed identity.

Sartre's critique of Freud's model of repression is central here. He argues that the censor mechanism merely displaces the problem: the censor must itself be in bad faith, since it must know what it represses in order to repress it while simultaneously not knowing it as repressed. The genuine resolution requires acknowledging the unity of consciousness rather than splitting the psyche into regions — a move that Lacan would later explicitly contest by articulating the unconscious as radically exterior to any form of self-transparency. Sartre examines paradigmatic patterns of bad faith: the young woman who dissociates her body from her consciousness during seduction (using the facticity/transcendence ambiguity), and the waiter who plays at being a waiter with excessive precision (trying to be his function as an in-itself). Both examples exploit the structural duality of facticity and transcendence, each selectively emphasizing one pole to evade the other.

The chapter concludes by examining sincerity as bad faith's mirror image: the demand 'be what you are' is equally incoherent because it presupposes the very impossibility it seeks to overcome — a consciousness that truly was what it is would not need to be commanded to be it. Both sincerity and bad faith are grounded in the same ontological structure: the for-itself's constitutive inability to coincide with itself. Sartre gestures toward 'authenticity' as the alternative — a 'self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted' — but defers its description, noting that it lies outside the scope of the present work.

Key concepts: Bad faith, Facticity, Transcendence, Sincerity, Unconscious, For-itself Notable examples: The young woman on a date; The waiter playing at being a waiter; Freud's censor mechanism; Heidegger's Mitsein and the lie

Part Two, Chapter One: Immediate Structures of the For-Itself

Sartre now proceeds to the positive ontology of the for-itself. Its most fundamental structure is 'presence to itself': the for-itself is not simply identical with itself (that would be the in-itself) but exists as a being for which there is always an 'impalpable fissure' within being — a nihilating distance from itself that makes self-relation possible without entailing self-coincidence. The 'self' is neither subject nor predicate but an ideal limit, an 'absent-presence,' the reason for an infinite movement of reflection in which reflecting and reflected can never finally merge.

From this primary structure Sartre derives the for-itself's constitutive lack: human reality arises as lack, as a being that surpasses itself toward what it is not, driven by the impossible project of achieving the synthesis of in-itself and for-itself — the ens causa sui, which is God. Value is ontologically grounded here: it is the 'lacked' being that haunts the for-itself as its impossible ideal, consubstantial with consciousness rather than externally imposed. Possibility, similarly, is not a logical or subjective notion but an ontological structure of the for-itself: possible is what the for-itself has-to-be, its own being projected beyond the present. The chapter also establishes the 'circuit of selfness': the for-itself is individuated not by possession of an Ego (which is a transcendent psychic object, not an inner subject) but by its selfness — the very movement of nihilating self-presence that constitutes it as this consciousness rather than another.

Key concepts: For-itself, Presence to self, Lack, Value, Possibility, Selfness Notable examples: Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego on the non-personal Ego; Leibniz on God as self-cause; Descartes' cogito and instantaneity

Part Two, Chapter Two: Temporality

Temporality is not a container or a succession of 'nows' but the ekstatic structure of the for-itself's being across past, present, and future. Sartre analyzes each dimension: the past is what the for-itself was, the in-itself it has become, its facticity and essence — 'Wesen ist was gewesen ist' (Hegel). The for-itself cannot simply be its past (it has to be it as surpassed), so the past is both intimately mine and radically not-me. The present is presence-to-being: the for-itself exists as presence to the in-itself, which distinguishes it from all spatial contiguity; only a being capable of internal negation can be present to another. The future is not a 'now not yet' but what the for-itself has-to-be as its own possibility, drawing it forward as lack toward a projected self-coincidence that is never achieved.

Sartre criticizes Kantian temporality (which requires a non-temporal 'I think' to unify successive moments) and Bergsonian duration (which posits time as pure immanence without accounting for separation) as both failing to account for the ekstatic unity of past-present-future in a single temporalizing act. Temporality is the form of the for-itself's being as a 'detotalized totality' — always more than its present moment, constitutively dispersed across its dimensions. The third section of the chapter addresses original temporality and its degradation into psychic temporality through impure reflection: when the for-itself hypostasizes its reflected states into a quasi-substantial psyche (the Ego, states, qualities, acts), it produces what psychologists study as 'psychic facts' — but these are degraded, inert, in-itself versions of the living movement of consciousness. Bergson's 'duration' is accordingly criticized as a description of psychic temporality mistaken for original temporality.

Key concepts: Temporality, For-itself, Past, Present, Future, Reflection Notable examples: Hegel's 'Wesen ist was gewesen ist'; Bergson's duration and multiplicity of interpenetration; Kant's critique of pure succession; Husserl on retention and protention

Part Two, Chapter Three: Transcendence

Transcendence names the for-itself's fundamental mode of relating to the in-itself through knowledge: to know is not to ingest or assimilate being but to be present to it as what one is not. Knowledge is the original internal negation by which the for-itself constitutes itself as 'not being' the thing it apprehends, and the thing appears as 'this' — as a determined existent — only against the ground of the world as radical negation. The structure of figure/ground in Gestalt psychology is grounded here ontologically: the 'this' appears because the for-itself performs a specific negation on the ground of a syncretic total negation of the world.

Sartre derives from this the ontological basis of quality, quantity, space, potentiality, and instrumentality. Each of these is a nihilated 'projection' of the for-itself's structure onto being: quality is the whole of being as it appears to a nothingness; quantity is pure external relation between thises; space is the relation of exteriority between beings that have no relation in themselves; potentiality is what the for-itself reveals as 'lacking' in the this from the standpoint of its projected future. Instrumentality is the primary structure of the world: things appear not as pure objects but as tool-complexes pointing toward ends. The chapter also offers an extended analysis of the world's time, including a treatment of motion as the revelation of pure exteriority in the present. The conclusion synthesizes the epistemological implications: Sartre grants realism that being is entirely present to consciousness without distortion, and grants idealism that worldliness, spatiality, and temporality are functions of nihilation — but insists that neither position alone captures the truth, because knowledge is precisely the being of the for-itself as presence to the in-itself.

Key concepts: Transcendence, Negation, Phenomenology, Appearance, Gaze, For-itself Notable examples: Gestalt figure/ground analysis; Potentiality: crescent moon and full moon; Instrumentality and hodological space; Einstein's relativity of motion

Part Three, Chapter One: The Existence of Others

Part Three opens with the problem of solipsism: how can the Other's existence be established if my only access to it is through the Other's body as an object in my world? Sartre reviews and rejects the main philosophical solutions. Realism treats the Other's soul as mediated through two bodies and cannot achieve direct presence. Husserl's reduction of the Other to a meaning-complex in my consciousness makes the Other an absence rather than a presence and cannot escape solipsism. Hegel makes significant progress by grounding self-consciousness in the recognition of another self-consciousness, but falls into ontological optimism: he takes the point of view of the Whole to resolve a conflict that can only be lived from within a particular consciousness, and he reduces the for-itself to an abstract 'I am I' that fails to capture its concrete, non-identical structure.

Heidegger's Mitsein ('being-with') is equally insufficient: it posits co-existence as an ontological structure but cannot explain the passage from the abstract 'with' to the concrete encounter with this Other (Pierre, Annie), leaving two incommunicable levels — the ontological and the ontic — without a bridge.

Sartre's own solution is the Look (le regard). The Other is not first given as an object; the Other is originally given as the look that transforms me into an object. When I am seen, I experience a radical alienation: my possibilities are fixed, my freedom is transcended, my body appears as an in-itself in the midst of the Other's world. Shame is the primary affect of this ontological structure — it is not a psychic state but the recognition that I am indeed the object the Other perceives. The Look constitutes a new dimension of my being — being-for-others — that cannot be derived from my being-for-itself or from the Other's being-as-object: it is the irreducible factual necessity that with my upsurge into being there is also an Other for whom I exist as an object. The chapter concludes by establishing the logical structure of the negation that constitutes the Other: it must be an internal, not external, negation — a synthetic, two-fold relation in which I constitute myself as not-being-the-Other and the Other simultaneously constitutes himself as not-being-me, producing a 'detotalized totality' that cannot be surveyed from outside.

Key concepts: Being-for-others, Gaze, Alienation [lacan], Subject, The big Other, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Husserl's transcendental intersubjectivity; Hegel's master/slave dialectic; Heidegger's Mitsein; The keyhole scene and shame; Kafka's The Trial and The Castle

Part Three, Chapter Two: The Body

Sartre's account of the body is one of the most original sections of the work, distinguishing three ontological dimensions: the body as being-for-itself, the body as being-for-others, and the body as it is experienced through the Other's revelation. The body-for-itself is not an object that consciousness inhabits; it is the contingent form assumed by the necessity of the for-itself's contingency — the facticity that the for-itself 'exists' without being able to apprehend it as such. The body is the perpetually surpassed: it is always the 'immediate past' of the for-itself's engagement with the world, the point-of-view and point-of-departure that the for-itself never directly confronts because it is always beyond it.

The body cannot be reduced to sensation, physiological mechanism, or psychophysical parallelism. What the physiologist describes as the nervous system is the Other's body, not my body-for-myself. I do not have a body as an instrument; I am my body in the mode of existing it. Nausea — the perpetual, non-positional apprehension of the body's facticity — is the fundamental coenesthetic affect: a 'dull and inescapable nausea' that reveals my contingent existence to me without any specific object, and on the ground of which all concrete empirical nauseas (disgust at excrement, spoiled food) arise.

The body-for-others is what the Other's look constitutes: my body appears to the Other as a pure in-itself among in-itselfs, my facticity stripped of its lived surpassing. The Other apprehends my contingency as a given configuration, and it is only through the Other that my body gains an 'outside.' The third dimension — my body as known through the Other — produces the psychic body: the illness as disease named and diagnosed by a physician, the body-for-others internalized as my own alienated objectivity.

Key concepts: Facticity, For-itself, Being-for-others, Consciousness, Jouissance, Alienation [lacan] Notable examples: Maine de Biran's 'sensation of effort'; Nausea as fundamental coenesthesia; The physician looking at the patient's leg; Illness and disease as being-for-others

Part Three, Chapter Three: Concrete Relations with Others

With the basic ontological structures established, Sartre turns to the concrete modalities of being-for-others. All relations with the Other are governed by the fundamental conflict between two incompatible projects: either I attempt to recover my alienated being by incorporating the Other's freedom (love, seduction, language, masochism) or I attempt to transcend the Other by transforming his subjectivity into an object (indifference, desire, sadism, hate). Neither project can succeed, and the failure of each generates the conditions for the other — producing what Sartre calls the 'circle of relations with the Other.'

Love is analyzed as the contradictory effort to be the ground of the Other's freedom while remaining an object for that freedom: the lover wants to be loved not as a thing but as a freedom — to possess a freedom as freedom. This is structurally impossible because as soon as the beloved loves the lover, the beloved becomes an object for the lover, and the lover is left alone facing the Other's objectivity rather than subjectivity. Desire is the attempt to appropriate the Other's body as flesh — to make consciousness appear on the surface of the body through incarnation — but the act of physical appropriation re-instrumentalizes the body and dissolves the desired incarnation. Sadism emerges from desire's failure: it seeks to produce flesh through violence and compulsion, but this too fails because the sadist, in using the Other as an instrument, loses the very subjectivity he sought to ensnare. Masochism attempts to coincide with one's own objectness for the Other, but this is equally impossible since the masochist's consciousness is always present as the one who organizes the masochistic scene.

Sartre also analyzes the social dimensions of being-for-others: the Third's look constitutes an 'Us-object,' a community of alienated consciousnesses; the We-subject is a fleeting, unstable experience of shared transcendence that has no metaphysical weight; class consciousness is the assuming of an Us-object in the face of an oppressing class experienced as an undifferentiated 'They.' The section concludes with hate as the radical project of abolishing the Other entirely — recognizing, however, that even the Other's death does not free me from the dimension of being-for-others, since my being-as-object-for-others precedes and survives any particular Other.

Key concepts: Desire, Fantasy, Gaze, Jouissance, Sublimation, Repetition Notable examples: Proust's Marcel and Albertine; Love as a conflict of freedoms; Sadism and the obscene; Kafka's The Trial; Class consciousness and the Us-object

Part Four, Chapter One: Being and Doing — Freedom

Part Four presents Sartre's full account of freedom and its relation to facticity, situation, and responsibility. The analysis begins from action: an act is intentional, and intention is always a nihilation of the given toward a projected end. The recognition of a 'desideratum' — an objective lack — is the necessary condition of action, and this recognition is possible only for a consciousness that has already withdrawn from the fullness of being. Freedom is therefore not a property of consciousness but is identical with consciousness itself: to be for-itself is to be free. The will is not a special faculty that produces freedom but merely one mode of it — reflective deliberation is always 'after the chips are down,' since the very choice to deliberate is itself free.

Sartre then introduces the crucial distinction between motive (the subjective reason for acting) and cause (the objective state of affairs apprehended as a means to an end), arguing that both are constituted by the free project rather than constituting it: the nihilating act by which freedom posits its end simultaneously illuminates the situation as causally structured and recovers motives from the past as relevant. He illustrates this through the analysis of fatigue: the same objective tiredness is lived entirely differently by different climbers, revealing that the meaning of one's situation is inseparable from one's original project of self.

The longest section examines freedom-in-situation: place, past, environment, fellow-man, and death each constitute dimensions of facticity that freedom must assume, nihilate, and surpass. My place is contingent but becomes an obstacle or a resource only in the light of my chosen ends; my past is mine as what I have been, but its urgency is continually reconstituted by my present project. Most radically, Sartre argues that death is not a possibility of the for-itself (as Heidegger claims) but an absurdity — an event that happens to me from outside and removes all meaning from my projects rather than conferring meaning on them by delimiting them. The chapter concludes with the famous formula: 'Man is condemned to be free,' and with the assertion that the for-itself is wholly responsible for the world and for itself, bearing 'the weight of the whole world on its shoulders.'

Key concepts: Freedom, Facticity, Anxiety, Negation, Sublimation, Dialectics Notable examples: Constantine founding Byzantium; The mountain-climbing fatigue example; The anti-Semite and the Jew's assumption of his situation; Leibniz on freedom and essence; Heidegger's being-unto-death

Part Four, Chapter Two: Doing and Having — Existential Psychoanalysis and Possession

The final chapter develops Sartre's existential psychoanalysis as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis. Both methods seek an irreducible foundation for human conduct; both treat apparent surface behaviors as expressions of a deeper structure; both reject the subject's privileged self-knowledge and require objective method. But existential psychoanalysis rejects the hypothesis of the unconscious and the primacy of libidinal determinism, replacing the complex with the 'original choice of being' and replacing the libido with the fundamental project of human reality: the desire to be the in-itself-for-itself, the impossible ens causa sui. Every empirical desire is a specification of this fundamental project, and existential psychoanalysis aims to decode the symbolic expressions through which each individual instantiates it.

Sartre then analyzes the three fundamental relations to being — doing, having, and being — as modes of appropriation. Possession is analyzed as the attempt to appropriate the in-itself while preserving it as an independent object: to possess is to be one's own foundation in the form of an indifferent in-itself external to oneself. The analysis is extended to the symbolic meanings of material qualities: the slimy (visqueux) receives its most extended treatment. The slimy is the nightmare reversal of the for-itself's relation to being — instead of sliding over being without being captured by it, the slimy threatens to absorb the for-itself, to transform the nihilating pour-soi into a degraded in-itself. The slimy symbolizes a mode of being in which the in-itself threatens to swallow the for-itself: 'a sickly-sweet, feminine revenge' of the in-itself. Sartre extends this psychoanalysis of matter to holes, softness, hardness, snow, and sexuality, arguing that material qualities are not neutral but always already charged with ontological meaning that is revealed in and through the for-itself's projects.

The conclusion returns to the fundamental question: all human projects are variations on the impossible desire to be God — to be both what one is (in-itself) and what one makes oneself be (for-itself). This impossibility is not a defect of particular projects but the structure of human reality as such. 'Everything happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the-world succeeded in realizing only a missing God.' The closing pages gesture toward an ethics of freedom that would take freedom itself as its value rather than the impossible ideal of self-causation — but this project is explicitly deferred.

Key concepts: Lack, Fantasy, Jouissance, Real, Sublimation, Identification Notable examples: Flaubert and Dostoevsky as candidates for existential psychoanalysis; The slimy (le visqueux) as ontological symbol; Smoking as appropriative destruction of the world; Skiing as appropriation of snow; The hole as pre-sexual ontological category

Conclusion: Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself, and Metaphysical Implications

The brief Conclusion synthesizes the ontological results of the work. The for-itself is identified with Plato's Other in the Sophist: it has no being except its being-other, a 'borrowed being' that can only appear marginally against the ground of the in-itself. The for-itself is a 'non-substantial absolute' — it is absolute in that nothing outside it causes its mode of being, but it is non-substantial in that its being is pure nothingness of being. The upsurge of the for-itself from the in-itself is an absolute contingent event with no prior necessity, and the resulting totality — in-itself plus for-itself — is a 'detotalized totality' whose synthesis was never achieved.

Sartre distinguishes between ontology and metaphysics at this point: ontology describes the structures of being as they are found; metaphysics must ask why there is a for-itself at all, why being nihilates itself into consciousness. This question cannot be answered within ontology. The ideal of a total being that would integrate both regions — the ens causa sui — is the standard by which we judge the real, and it is precisely because the real falls perpetually short of this ideal that human reality is both indissolubly tied to the in-itself and yet always at a distance from it. The Conclusion closes with the announcement that a future work will address the ethical consequences — specifically whether freedom can take itself as its own value and what that would mean for human existence.

Key concepts: For-itself, In-itself, Real, Gap, Dialectics, Consciousness Notable examples: Plato's Sophist on the Other; Spinoza and Hegel on the relation of consciousness and being; The ens causa sui and the 'missing God'

Main interlocutors

• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Hegel, Science of Logic
• Heidegger, Being and Time
• Husserl, Ideas I
• Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
• Husserl, Logical Investigations
• Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
• Descartes, Meditations
• Leibniz, Monadology
• Spinoza, Ethics
• Bergson, Matter and Memory
• Bergson, Time and Free Will
• Plato, Sophist
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
• Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams

Position in the corpus

Being and Nothingness is the essential secondary philosophical foundation text in the Lacanian corpus, serving as both a resource and a target for Lacan's theoretical development. Readers coming to Lacan from a philosophical background will find that this text provides the most systematic pre-Lacanian phenomenological account of subjectivity, lack, the Other, and the gaze — concepts that Lacan inherits, transforms, and in crucial respects inverts. The Sartrean Look directly anticipates the Lacanian gaze (objet a in the scopic drive), but where Sartre treats the gaze as a reversible intersubjective event structured by the conflict of freedoms, Lacan locates the gaze at the level of the drive-apparatus and insists on its irreversible asymmetry with vision. Similarly, Sartre's for-itself as constitutive lack anticipates Lacan's subject as barred ($), but the Sartrean subject retains a radical freedom and transparency (even in bad faith it knows what it flees) that Lacan dissolves by insisting on the radical exteriority of the symbolic order and the unconscious. Being and Nothingness should be read before or alongside Lacan's Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts) for the gaze material, and before Seminar VI (Desire and its Interpretation) for the treatment of desire as lack of being.\n\nWithin the broader corpus of secondary literature, Being and Nothingness neighbors Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (which Sartre explicitly engages and from which he draws the master/slave dialectic and the structure of recognition) and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (which develops a rival account of embodiment that Sartre's body chapter anticipates but does not resolve). Žižek's work frequently invokes Sartre as a foil — particularly the Sartrean account of bad faith — to illuminate the Lacanian point that the subject is not self-transparent but is constitutively divided by the signifier. Readers interested in Lacan's critique of ego psychology and of the imaginary register of identification will find in Sartre's critique of the Freudian unconscious and his account of the Look and shame a rich pre-history of those concerns.

Canonical concepts deployed

• Phenomenology
• Consciousness
• Negation
• For-itself
• In-itself
• Bad Faith
• Facticity
• Lack
• Anxiety
• Gaze
• Being-for-others
• Subject
• Subjectivity
• Freedom
• Splitting of the Subject
• Alienation [lacan]
• Desire
• Reflection
• Appearance
• Jouissance