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Summary: Being and Nothingness (page 8)


Now I can try to recover this being that I am, which is at a distance, in the Other: I am a project of recovering my being 1. This is only possible if I assimilate the freedom of the Other. That is love: taking hold of the freedom of others.


So the lover does not desire the subjugation of the beloved. He is not keen to become the object of a mechanical passion:He does not want to possess an automatism 2, to be loved by psychological determinism (he would feel devalued).

In fact, the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing: he demands a special type of appropriation: he wants to possess freedom as freedom 3. He wants to be loved by a freedom and demands that this freedom as freedom no longer be free 4 (to leave him, to go away, etc.)

This brings great happiness:

Instead of being worried about this unjustified protuberance that was our existence before we were loved, now this existence is wanted by a freedom that we ourselves want with our own freedom. This is the essence of the joy of love: to feel justified in existing 5.


Now in fact love is always a failure, for three reasons:

It is an infinite regress since to love is to want the other to want me to love him 6. On the other hand, the other's awakening is always possible, he can always make me appear as an object; there is therefore a perpetual insecurity of love. Finally, our love is an absolute that is perpetually relativised by others. We would have to be alone in the world with the beloved.


2/ Indifference, desire, hatred

The second type of attitude I can adopt is to turn the other into object.

For example, in indifference: others are merely objects or functions: the metro punchman is merely a function of punching, etc. There are men who die without having - except during brief and terrifying illuminations, suspected what the Other was 7.

Or again in desire. Desire does not imply the sexual act, but reveals the facticity of my body and that of others, i.e. my body as flesh.

Desire is also failure: pleasure is its end.

Part four: having, doing and being

Sartre now examines these three cardinal categories which subsume under them all human conduct 8. Thus knowing is nothing other than a modality of having.


The action is intentional. The smoker who inadvertently explodes a powder keg has not acted.

Action does obey a mobile (against the advocates of freedom of indifference, or action without motives), but this does not mean that we should adhere to determinism. It is in fact the for-itself that gives the motive its value as a motive.

This is why freedom is the fabric of my being 9, which can be rephrased as follows: I am condemned to be free 10.

It is necessary to differentiate between the reason and the motive for an action. If the reason is the explanation for an act, the set of rational considerations that justify it 11, the motive is a subjective fact [...], the set of desires, emotions, and passions that impel me to perform a certain act 12.

A reason cannot, contrary to what determinism asserts, determine action, including in that rational calculation of motives that is deliberation. In fact, when I deliberate, all bets are off 13.


Sartre nevertheless presents a common sense argument against freedom: our impotence:

I was born a worker, French, with tuberculosis. The story of a life, whatever it may be, is the story of failure. The coefficient of adversity of things is such that it takes years of patience before the tiniest result is obtained [...] Much more than he seems to "make himself", man seems to "be made" by climate and land, race and class, etc. 14.

Sartre replies that it is through us that the coefficient of adversity of things arises. This rock resists if I want to move it, but offers precious help if I want to climb it to see the panorama: In itself, it is neutral, that is, it waits to be illuminated by an end in order to manifest itself as adversary or as auxiliary 15.

Certainly, there remains an incompressible residue that belongs to the in itself (e.g. such and such a rock will be more or less conducive to climbing), but far from this residue being a limit to freedom, it is on this that freedom relies to assert itself as freedom.


There is freedom only in a resistant world 16.

This is what Sartre calls the situation: the contingency of freedom in the world's plenum of being, [...] a joint product of the contingency of the in-itself and freedom, [...] an ambiguous phenomenon, in which it is impossible for the being-for-itself to discern the contribution of freedom and the gross existent 17.

Thus there is freedom only in situation and there is situation only through freedom 18.


1 ibid., p.404
2 ibid., p.407
3 ibid.
4 ibid.
5 ibid., p.411
6 ibid., p.416
7 III, 2, p.421
8 4ème partie, p.475
9 I, 1, p.483
10 ibid, p.484
11 ibid., p.490
12 ibid., p.491
13 ibid., p.495
14 I, 2, p.527
15 ibid.
16 ibid., p.528
17 ibid., p.532-533
18 ibid., p.534