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"Being in itself" vs "being for itself"..(Sartre) - Magical Realist - Sep 7, 2023
"A “being-in-itself” simply “is what it is” (Sartre Being 28) – it is an object of consciousness, a thing, and it is nothing more than its current identity. “Being-for-itself”, on the other hand, “is defined . .as being what it is not and not being what it is” (28), meaning that a “being-for-itself” cannot be defined by its current identity; it has a potentiality – a freedom to change – that makes it able to, in a sense, be what it is not. The former type of being refers to things in the world, while the latter refers to subjects with consciousness and potentiality, i.e. human beings. A human, as a being-for-itself, “is at once a facticity and a transcendence” (98) – this means that a being-for-itself has a “necessary connection with the In-itself, hence with the world and its own past” (802), i.e. it is a facticity, but it is also a transcendence, which means that “the For itself goes beyond the given in a further project of itself” (807).31
In other words, the human being-for-itself contains a paradox: it can be defined as a facticity (i.e. an identity, like a being-in-itself), but it at the same time transcends that facticity in its potentiality, its ever-present freedom to no longer be its facticity. As a result, “[c]onsciousness or conscious man or man simply is fundamentally projective, and . . . he is restless in essence, existing always towards a future possible which he is now not” (Earle 94) – thus, a human being as such always strives to project himself beyond what he currently is......"
2006
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Bad Faith of Empire
Megan Henricks
Denison University
https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=religion#:~:text=A%20human%2C%20as%20a%20being,For%2D%20itself%20goes%20beyond%20the