psychedelic raine: June 2010

Notes/Quotes from Sartre's Being and Nothingness:

I. Freedom: The First Condition of Act

“The concept of an act contains, in fact, numerous subordinate notions which we shall have to organize and arrange in a hierarchy: to act is to modify the shape of the world; it is to arrange means in view of an end it is to produce an organized instrumental complex such that by a series of concatenations and connections the modification effected on one of the links causes modifications throughout the whole series and finally produces an anticipated result” (559).

“an action is on principle intentional… This does not mean, of course, that one must foresee all the consequences of his act” (559).

“This means that from the moment of the first conception of the act, consciousness has been able to withdraw itself from the full world of which it is consciousness and to leave the level of being in order frankly to approach that of non-being” (560).

“No factual state whatever it may be is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way determine by itself what is not” (562).

“Under no circumstances can the past in any way by itself produce an act” (563).

“all action is the freedom of the acting being” (563).

“there is no act without a cause, this is not in the sense that we can say that there is no phenomenon without a cause. In order to be a cause, the cause must be experienced as such” (564).

“fear is understood in turn only in relation to the value which I implicitly give to this life” (564).

“It is only because I escape the in-itself by nihilating myself toward my possibilities that this in-itself can take on value as cause or motive. Causes and motives have meaning only inside a projected ensemble which is precisely an ensemble of non-existents. And this ensemble is ultimately myself as transcendence; it is Me in so far as I have to be myself outside of myself” (564).

“it is in fact impossible to find an act without a motive but that does not mean that we must conclude that the motive causes the act; the motive is an integral part of the act” (565).

“It is the act which decides its ends and its motives, and the act is the expression of freedom” (565).

“The fundamental condition of the act is freedom” (565).

“Now freedom has no essence” (565).

“It [freedom] is not subject to any logical necessity” (565).

“I could not describe a freedom which would be common to both the Other and myself; I could not therefore contemplate an essence of freedom. On the contrary, it is freedom which is the foundation of all essences” (566).

“Freedom is beyond essence” (566).

“The question is of my freedom” (566).

“to be is to have been” (566).

“I am indeed an existent who learns his freedom through his acts, but I am also an existent whose individual and unique existence temporalizes itself as freedom. As such I am necessarily a consciousness (of) freedom since nothing exists in consciousness except as the non-thetic consciousness of existing. Thus my freedom is perpetually in question in my being; it is not a quality added on or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff of my being; and as in my being, my being is in question, I must necessarily possess a certain comprehension of freedom” (566).

“…if negation comes into the world through human-reality, the latter must be a being who can realize a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself… the permanent possibility of rupture is the same as freedom… this permanent possibility of nihilating what I am in the form of “having-been” implies for man a particular type of existence” (567).

“For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is… the for-itself escapes its being as its essence” (567).

“Indeed by the sole fact that I am conscious of the causes which inspire my action, these causes are already transcendent objects for my consciousness; they are outside. In vain shall I seek to catch hold of them; I escape them by my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free” (567).

“the refusal of freedom can be conceived only as an attempt to apprehend oneself as being-in-itself” (567-568).

“human reality perpetually tries to refuse to recognize its freedom” (568).

“Human reality is free because it is not enough. It is free because it is perpetually wrenched away from itself and because it has been separated by a nothingness from what it is and from what it will be. It is free, finally, because it’s present being is itself a nothingness in the form of “reflection-reflecting.” Man is free because he is not himself but presence to himself. The being which is what it is can not be free. Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is made-to-be at the heart of man and which forces human-reality to make itself instead of to be. As we have seen, for human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to it either from the outside or from within which it can receive or accept” (568).
“Thus freedom is not a being; it is the being of man” (569).

“…he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all” (569).

“If the hand can clasp, it is because it can be clasped” (569).

“Spontaneity, since by definition is beyond reach, can not in turn reach; it can produce only itself… it is impossible for a determined process to act upon a spontaneity, exactly as it is impossible for objects to act upon consciousness” (569).

“The only bond which a nihilating spontaneity could maintain with mechanical processes would be the fact that it produces itself by an internal negation directed toward these existents” (569).

“either man is wholly determined… or else wholly free” (570).

“If the will is to be freedom, then it is of necessity negativity and the power of nihilation. But then we no longer can see why autonomy should be preserved for the will” (570).

“But if we wish to avoid the error which we denounced earlier and not consider these transcendent ends as pre-human and as an a priori limit to our transcendence, then we are indeed compelled to recognize that they are the temporalizing projection of our freedom. Human reality can not receive its ends… either from outside or from a so-called inner “nature.” It chooses them and by this very choice confers upon them a transcendent existence as the external limit of its projects. From this point of view and it is understood that the existence of the Dasein precedes and commands its essence – human reality in and through its very upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends. It is therefore the positing of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being and which is identical with the sudden thrust of the freedom which is mine. And this thrust is an existence; it has nothing to do with an essence or with a property of a being which would be engendered conjointly with an idea. Thus since freedom is identical with my existence, it is the foundation of ends which I shall attempt to attain either by the will or by the passionate efforts. Therefore it can not be limited to voluntary acts” (572).

“Freedom is nothing but the existence of our will or of our passions in so far as this existence is the nihilation of facticity; that is, the existence of a being which is its being in the mode of having to be it” (573).

“My fear is free and manifests my freedom; I have put all my freedom into my fear, and I have chosen myself as fearful in this or that circumstance. Under other circumstances I shall exist as deliberate and courageous, and I shall have put all my freedom into my courage. In relation to freedom there is no privileged psychic phenomenon. All my “modes of being” manifest freedom equally since they are all ways of being my own nothingness” (574).

“The motive… is generally considered as a subjective fact. It is the ensemble of the desires, emotions, and passions which urge me to accomplish a certain act” (576).

“the cause is objective; it is the state of contemporary things as it is revealed to a consciousness” (567).

“Nevertheless this state of affairs can be revealed only to a for-itself since in general the for-itself is the being by which “there is” a world. Better yet, it can be revealed only to a for-itself which chooses itself in this or that particular way – that is, to a for-itself which has made its own individuality. The for-itself must of necessity have projected itself in this or that way in order to discover the instrumental implications of instrumental-things” (577).

“The internal organization which consciousness has given to itself in the form of non-positional self-consciousness is strictly correlative with the carving out of causes in the world” (578).

“cause and motive are correlative” (579).

“Just as the consciousness of something is self-consciousness, so the motive is nothing other than the apprehension of the cause in so far as this apprehension is self-consciousness” (579).

“…the past is in-itself. The motive becomes then that of which there is consciousness. It can appear to me in the form of “empirical knowledge”; as we saw earlier, the dead past haunts the present in the aspect of a practical knowing. It can also happen that I turn back toward it so as to make it explicit and formulate it while guiding myself by the knowledge which it is for me in the present. In this case it is an object of consciousness; it is this very consciousness of which I am conscious. It appears therefore – like my memories in general – simultaneously as mine and as transcendent” (579-580).

“In a general way consciousness at whatever moment it is grasped is apprehended as engaged and this very apprehension implies a practical knowing of the motives of the engagement or even a thematic and positional explanation of thesse causes. It is obvious that the apprehension of the motive refers at once to the cause, its correlate, since the motive, even when made-past and fixed in-itself, at least maintains as its meaning the fact that it has been consciousness of a cause; the discovery of an objective structure of the world” (580).

“It is therefore by the very thrust of the engaged consciousness that a value and a weight will be conferred on motives and on prior causes. What they have been does not depend on consciousness, but consciousness has the duty of maintaining them in their existence in the past… but the meaning held for me by this desire, this fear, these objective considerations of the world when presently I project myself toward my futures – this must be decided by me alone. I determine them precisely and only by the very act by which I project myself toward my ends. The recovery of former motives – or the rejection or new appreciation of them – is not distinct from the project by which I assign new ends to myself and by which in the light of these ends I apprehend myself as discovering a supporting cause in the world. Past motives, past causes, present motives and causes, future ends, all are organized in an indissoluble unity by the very upsurge of a freedom which is beyond causes, motives, and ends. The result is that a voluntary deliberation is always a deception” (580-581).

“Actually causes and motives have only the weight which my project… confers upon them” (581).

“There is therefore a choice of deliberation as a procedure which will make known to me what I project and consequently what I am. And the choice of deliberation is organized with the ensemble motives-causes and ends by free spontaneity. When the will intervenes, the decision is taken, and it has no other value than that of making the announcement” (581).

“…the will is not a privileged manifestation of freedom but that it is a psychic event of a peculiar structure which is constituted on the same plane as other psychic events and which is supported, neither more nor less than the others, by an original, ontological freedom” (583).

“One could even state that determinism – if one were careful not to confuse it with fatalism – is “more human” than the theory of free will. In fact while determinism throws into relief the strict conditioning of our acts, it does at least give the reason for each of them. And if it is strictly limited to the psychic, if it gives up looking for a conditioning in the ensemble of the universe, it shows that the reason for our acts is in ourselves: we act as we are, and our acts contribute to making us” (583).

“…freedom is actually one with being of the For-itself; human reality is free to the exact extent that it has to be its own nothingness… it has to be this nothingness… in multiple dimensions: first, by temporalizing itself…second, by rising up as consciousness of something and (of) itself… and finally, by being transcendence…” (583-584).

“An existent which as consciousness is necessarily separated from all others because they are in connection with it only to the extent that they are for it, an existent which decides its past in the form of a tradition in the light of its future instead of allowing it purely and simply to determine its present, an existent which makes known to itself what it is by means of something other than it… this is what we call a free existent” (584).

“There are as many ways of existing one’s body as there are For-itselfs although naturally certain original structures are invariable and in each For-itself constitute human-reality. We shall be concerned with what is incorrectly called the relation of the individual to space and to the conditions of a universal truth” (587).

“…each attitude of failure is itself transcendence since each time I surpass the real toward my possibilities” (592).

“This form which we call our ultimate possibility is not just one possible among others – not even though it be… the possibility of dying or of “no longer realizing any presence in the world.” Every particular possibility, in fact, is articulated in an ensemble. It is necessary to conceive of this ultimate possibility as the unitary synthesis of all our actual possibles; each of these possibles resides in an undifferentiated state in the ultimate possibility until a particular circumstance comes to throw it into relief without, however, thereby suppressing its quality of belonging to the totality” (593).

“I cannot perceive any instrumental thing whatsoever unless it is in terms of the absolute existence of all existents, for my first being is being-in-the-world” (593).

“Thus the first phenomenon of being in the world is the original relation between the totality of the in-itself or world and my own totality detotalized; I choose myself as a whole in the world which is a whole. Just as I come from the world to a particular “this,” so I come from myself as a detotalized totality to the outline of one of my particular possibilities since I can apprehend a particular “this” on the ground of the world only on the occasion of a particular project of myself” (593-594).

“…profound choice… is simply one with the consciousness which we have of ourselves. This consciouness… can be only non-positional… it is not distinct from our being. And as our being is precisely our original choice, the consciousncess (of) the choice is identical with the self-consciousness which we have. One must be conscious in order to choose, and one must choose in order to be conscious. Choice and consciouness are one and the same thing” (595).

“What difference is there… between a willed feeling and an experienced feeling? Actually there is no difference. “To will to love” and to love are one since to love is to choose oneself as loving by assuming consciousness of loving” (595).

“… to assume self-consciousness never means to assume a consciousness of the instant; for the instant is only one view of the mind and even if it existed, a consciousness which would apprehend itself in the instant would no longer apprehend anything. I can assume consciousness of myself only as a particular man engaged in this or that enterprise, anticipating this or that success, fearing this or that result, and by means of the ensemble of these anticipations, outlining his whole figure” (595).

“My ultimate and initial project… always the outline of a solution of the problem of being. But this solution is not first conceived and then realized; we are this solution. We make it exist by means of our very engagement, and therefore we shall be able to apprehend it only by living it. Thus we are always wholly present to ourselves; but precisely because we are wholly present, we can not hope to have an analytical and detailed consciousness of what we are” (596).

“…the world by means of its very articulation regers to us exactly the image of what we are” (596).

“In fact it is by surpassing the world toward ourselves that we make it appear such as it is. We choose the world, not in its contexture as in-itself but in its meaning, by choosing ourselves. Through the internal negation by denying that we are the world, we make the world appear as world, and this internal negation can exist only if it is at the same time a projection toward the possible. It is the very way in which I entrust myself to the inanimate, in which I abandon myself to my body (or, on the other hand, the way in which I resist either one of these) which causes the appearance of both my body and the inanimate world with their respective value” (596).
“we are perpetually engaged in our choice and perpetually conscious of the fact that we ourselves can abruptly invert this choice and “reverse steam”l for we project the future by our very being, but our existential freedom perpetually eats it away as we make known to ourselves what we are by means of the future but without getting a grip on this future which remains always possible without ever passing to the rank of the real” (598).

“To choose ourselves is to nihilate ourselves; that is, to cause a future to come to make known to us what we are by conferring a meaning on our past” (599).

“Thus freedom, choice, nihilation, temporalization are all one and the same thing” (599).

“By the free choice of this modification, in fact, we temporalize a project which we are, and we make known to ourselves by a future the being which we have chosen; thus the pure present belongs to the new temporalization as a beginning, and it receives from the future which has just arisen its own nature as a beginning” (600).

“another Adam would have been possible… this real Adam is surrounded by an infinity of possible Adams… But because of the necessary connection of possibles, another gesture of Adam would have been possible only for and by another Adam, and the existence of another Adam implies that of another world” (602).

“…the contingency… which makes freedom possible is found wholly contained within the essence of Adam. And this essence is not chosen by Adam himself but by God… Adam has not chosen it; he could not choose to be Adam. Consequently he does not support the responsibility for his being. Hence once he himself has been given, it is of little importance that one can attribute to him the relative responsibility of his act” (602-603).

“The view of the total project enables one to “understand” the particular structure considered” (604).

“the act of understanding is the interpretation of a factual connection and not the apprehension of a necessity” (605).

“the for-itself can make voluntary decisions which are opposed to the fundamental ends which it has chosen. These decisions can be only voluntary – that is, reflective. In fact they can derive only from an error committed either in good faith or in bad faith against the ends which I pursue” (606).

“It should be observed first of all that the choice of total ends although totally free is not necessarily nor even frequently made in joy” (606).

“We can even choose not to choose ourselves” (607).

“Whatever our being may be, it is a great choice; and it depends on us to choose ourselves…” (607)

“by means of the will, we can construct ourselves entirely, but that the will which presides over this construction finds its meaning in the original project which it can appear to deny, that consequently this construction has a function wholly different from that which it advertises, and that finally it can reach only details of structures and will never modify the original project from which it has issued any more than the consequences of a theorem can turn back against it and change it” (612).

“Thus human reality does not exist first in order to act later; but for human reality, to be is to act, and to cease to act is to cease to be” (613).

“The existence of the act implies its autonomy. Furthermore, if the act is not pure motion, it must be defined by an intention” (613).

“The intention, which is the fundamental structure of human-reality, can in no case be explained by a given. But if one wishes to interpret the intention by its end, care must be taken not to confer on this end an existence as a given” (614).

“The intention makes itself be by choosing the end which makes it known” (614).

“Since the intention is a choice of the end and since the world reveals itself across our conduct, it is the intentional choice of the end which reveals the world, and the world is revealed as this or that (in this or that order) according to the end chosen. The end, illuminating the world, is a state of the world to be obtained and not yet existing. The intention is a thetic consciousness of the end. But it can be so only by making itself a non-thetic consciousness of its own possibility” (614).

“My end is a certain objective state of the world, my possible is a certain structure of my subjectivity; the one is revealed to the thetic consciousness the other flows back over the non-thetic consciousness in order to characterize it” (614).

“Since human reality is act, it can be conceived only as being at its core a rupture with the given. It is the being which causes there to be a given by breaking with it and illuminating it in the light of the not-yet-existing” (615).

“It would be in vain to imagine that consciousness can exist without a given; in that case it would be consciousness (of) itself as consciousness of nothing – that is, absolute nothingness” (615).

“…the for-itself is free and can cause there to be a world because the for-itself is the being which has to be what it was in the light of what it will be. Therefore the freedom of the for-itself appears as its being. But since this freedom is neither a given nor a property, it can be only by choosing itself. The freedom of the for-itself is always engaged; there is no question here of a freedom which could be undetermined and which would pre-exist its choice. We shall never apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making. But freedom is simply the fact that this choice is always unconditioned” (616).

“freedom is a choice of its being but not the foundation of its being” (616).

“… human-reality can choose itself as it intends but is not able to not choose itself. It can not even refuse to be; suicide, in fact, is a choice and affirmation – of being” (616).

“… choice is that by which all foundations and all reasons come into being” (616).

“Freedom… is the perpetual escape from contingency: it is the interiorization, the nihilation, and the subjectivizing of contingency, which thus modified passes wholly into the gratuity of the choice” (617).

“… because here we are dealing with a choice, this choice as it is made indicates in general other choices as possibles” (617).

“my freedom eats away my freedom. Since I am free, I project my total possible, but I thereby posit that I am free and that I can always nihilate this first project and make it past” (618).

“No law of being can assign an a priori number to the different projects which I am. The existence of the for-itself in fact conditions its essence” (618).

“Our particular projects, aimed at the realization in the world of a particular end, are united in the global project which we are” (618).

“In addition freedom is the freedom of choosing but not the freedom of not choosing. Not to choose is, in fact, to choose not to choose. The result is that the choice is the foundation of being-chosen but not the foundation of choosing” (619).

“Hence the absurdity of freedom” (619).

II. Freedom and Facticity: The Situation

“In particular the coefficient of adversity in things can not be an argument against our freedom, for it is by us – by the preliminary positing of an end – that this coefficient of adversity arises” (620).

“…that the being who is said to be free is the one who can realize his projects. But in order for the act to be able to allow a realization, the simple projection of a possible end must be distinguished a priori from the realization of this end. If conceiving is enough for realizing, then I am plunged in a world like that of a dream in which the possible is no longer in any way distinguished from the real. I am condemned henceforth to see the world modified at the whim of the changes of my consciousness” (620-621).
“… the formula “to be free” does not mean “to obtain what one has wished” but rather “by oneself to determine oneself to wish”… success is not important to freedom” (621).

“…misunderstanding: the empirical and popular concept of “freedom” which has been produced by historical, political and moral circumstances is equivalent to “the ability to obtain the ends chosen” (622).

“Our description of freedom, since it does not distinguish between choosing and doing, compels us to abandon at once the distinction between the intention and the at. The intention can no more be separated from the act than thought can be separated from the language which expresses it; and as it happens that our speech informs us of our thought, so our acts will inform us of our intentions – that is, it will enable us to disengage our intentions, to schematize them, and to make objects of them instead of limiting us to living them” (622).

“… the for-itself is free. But this does not mean that it is its own foundation. If to be free is necessary that freedom should decide the existence of its being… First it would be necessary that freedom should decide its being-free; that is, not only that it should be a choice of an end, but that it should be a choice of itself as freedom. This would suppose therefore that the possibility of being-free and the possibility of not-being-free exist equally before the free choice of either one othem… before the free choice of freedom. But since then a previous freedom would be necessary which would choose to be free… basically, which would choose to be what it is already – we should be referred to infinity; for there would be need of another prior freedom in order to choose this and so on (623).

“… we are a freedom which chooses, but we do not choose to be free. We are condemned to freedom” (623).

“If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact. This is the facticity of freedom” (623).
The facticity of freedom is that it escapes fact.

“Actually if freedom decided the existence of its being, it would be necessary not only that my being not-free should be possible, but necessary as well that my absolute non-existence be possible” (623).

“A freedom which would produce its own existence would lose its very meaning as freedom. Actually freedom is not a simple undetermined power. If it were, it would be nothingness or in-itself” (624).

“… to do supposes the nihilation of a given. One does something with or to something. Thus freedom is a lack of being in relation to a given being” (624).

“… it could not therefore determine its existence from the standpoint of nothingness, for all production from the standpoint of nothingness can be only being-in-itself” (624).

“empirically we can be free only in relation to a state of things and in spite of this state of things” (624).

“freedom is a lesser being which supposes being in order to elude it. It is not free not to exist or not to be free” (625).

“Contingency and facticity are really one; there is a being which freedom has to be in the form of non-being. To exist as the fact of freedom or to have to be a being in the midst of the world are one and the same thing, and this means that freedom is originally a relation to the given” (625).

My Place

“the facticity of my place is revealed to me only in and through the free choice which I make of my end. Freedom is indispensable to the discovery of my facticity. I learn of this facticity from all the points of the future which I project” (634).

“My place appears in terms of the changes which I project. But to change implies something to be changed, which is precisely my place. Thus freedom is the apprehension of my facticity” (635).

“It is only in the act by which freedom has revealed facticity and apprehended it as place that this place thus defined is manifested as an impediment to my desires, an obstacle… Thus our freedom itself creates the obstacles from which we suffer. It is freedom itself which, by positing itse end and by choosing this end as inaccessible or accessible with difficulty, causes our placing to appear to our projects as an insurmountable resistance or a resistance to be surmounted with difficulty. It is freedom again which establishes the spatial connections between objects as the first type of a relation of instrumentality, which decides on techniques permitting distances to be measured and cleared, and thus constitutes its own restriction. But to be precise, freedom can exist only as restricted since freedom is choice. Every choice… supposes elimination and selection; every choice is a choice of finitude. Thus freedom can be truly free only by constituting facticity as its own restriction” (635-636).

“A being which is neither the foundation of its own being nor of the Other’s being nor of
the in-itselfs which form the world, but a being which is compelled to decide the meaning of being – within it and everywhere outside of it” (711).

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