Sartre's second century

128 Chapter Nine
being can never be released from the to-and-fro movement, or flight
toward being, that distinguishes man from thing and lends him his
freedom:
The being of human reality is originally not a substance but a lived relation
[...]. We should not say that man is at all: he is what he is not and he is not
what he is; he is the annihilation of the contingent In-itself in so far as the
self of this annihilation is its flight ahead toward the In-itself as selfcause.
17
"[T]he Sartrean subject is not just a thinking, rationalising consciousness
which gives meaning to things, but is also engaged—an actor immersed in
the world of things. In this sense it incorporates both freedom and
necessity, transcendence and facticity." 18 It is in praxis, as Sartre says, by
getting involved in the world to change or confirm a course of action, that
man "situates" his freedom as if he could pin himself down into pure
being. But his indeterminism will still prise him loose from the situations
he enters into. Man cannot escape his "facticity": the simple fact that he
has to be something in his world. But nor can he escape the contingency of
that same world: he is not free not to be free, as it were, and has to choose
as well as interpret roles to play. Man is neither complete being nor
absolute nothingness, but an unstable hybrid of the two. His freedom
emancipates him from any determinate state, then compels him to try and
retrieve such solidity, only to repeat this to-and-fro thereafter, forever
"beyond what I am, about to come to myself'. 19
Using this paradox, Murdoch notes that Sartre figures man as striving
for, but crucially never attaining, an impossible reconciliation of
opposites: a being in-itself-for-itself. Sartre's insistence that human consciousness
situates its freedom risks aggrandising the human condition by
positing an essential mode of being just beyond our reach. He had found
his taste for concrete or actual human experience uneasily diluted by the
idealism associated with Romantic writing. This cocktail is necessarily
volatile, since in experiencing himself as a lack of being, "we lose
ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion": 20 without direction, yet
"[L']§tre de la rgalitd humaine est originellement non une substance mais un
rapport v£cu [...]. L'homme n'est point: il est ce qu'il n'est pas et n'est pas ce
qu'il est, il est la ne'antisation de l'En-soi contingent en tant que le soi de cette
ndantisation est sa fuite en avant vers l'En-soi cause de soi" (L'fore et le neant,
664).
18 Farrell Fox, The New Sartre, 35.
19 "[P]ar dela ce que je suis, a venir a moi-m§me" (L'fore et le neant, 242).
20 "[N]ous nous perdons en vain: l'homme est une passion inutile" (ibid., 708).