What is this subjective being that I am? The distinction between reflexive consciousness (la conscience réflexive) and pre-reflexive consciousness (la conscience préréflexive) is essential to understanding Sartre’s phenomenology of the self. It finds its original and clearest expression not in Being and Nothingness but in Sartre’s short 1937 work The Transcendence of the Ego.
There Sartre argues against Husserl, that there is no transcendental ego, no irreducibly subjective and psychic self, no hidden inner source of one’s own mental states. Husserl’s transcendental ego is transcendental in two senses. On quasi-Kantian grounds, Husserl argues in Cartesian Meditations and elsewhere that there exists an ego that is a necessary condition for experience. The ego also transcends our ordinary pre-phenomenological consciousness. It is not to be found within the world of the natural attitude. It is revealed as the source of the transcendental field, or subjective consciousness, by the application of the epoché or transcendental reduction. It is the subjective ‘pole’ of my mental states and does not exist without them. It explains my numerical identity over time. It is what I ultimately am.
In The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre brings this argument against Husserl: Phenomenology is the description of what appears to consciousness, without any preconception about the objective reality of what thus appears. But no transcendental ego is given to consciousness, not before the phenomenological epoché and not after it. Rather, Husserl assumes or postulates the transcendental ego as an explanation of how consciousness is possible. It is not the role of phenomenology to postulate but to describe. Ironically, the transcendental ego falls before the epoché.
It does not follow from this argument alone that there is no transcendental ego, only that there are no consistent phenomenological grounds for postulating one. Nevertheless, Sartre insists on subjectivity: that which is conscious is not what consciousness is consciousness of. The subject of consciousness, is not an object of that consciousness.
Sartre thinks that the existence of the transcendental is inconsistent with the unity of consciousness. There is a unity of consciousness, so there is no transcendental ego. He perhaps overestimates the role of the transcendental ego in unifying consciousness in Husserl’s philosophy. Husserl thinks that acts of consciousness are parts of the same consciousness through the horizontal and vertical intentionalities of time consciousness. However, Husserl does think that some mental act’s being mine is its source being a particular transcendental ego. Sartre suggests instead that it is the intentional object of acts of consciousness that accounts for their unity. Consciousness unifies itself in the face of its objects and that is as much unity as consciousness has. Neither thinker has resolved the ultimate problem of what it is for acts of consciousness to be mine.
Sartre also argues that the existence of the transcendental ego is inconsistent with the freedom of consciousness. Consciousness is free, so there is no transcendental ego. Consciousness is a free spontaneity or play of nothingness. If conscious states were directed by a transcendental ego this spontaneity would be impossible.
The Transcendence of the Ego shows that Husserl misread Kant’s theory of the self in The Critique of Pure Reason and that Sartre understood Kant correctly. Kant, like Sartre, rejected the transcendental ego although most commentators, like Husserl, mistakenly ascribe it to Kant. In the Paralogisms chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant insists that there is no substantial, subjective, quasi-Cartesian self. Kant’s distinction between the noumenal self and the phenomenal self is only the distinction between how I am and how I appear to myself. The noumenal self is not an extra entity.
The psychic subject according to Sartre, far from being the subjective source of consciousness, is itself a product of consciousness. It is in fact the result of consciousness being turned on consciousness in reflexive consciousness. The I is not a psychic subject but a psychic object: the intentional object of reflexive consciousness. In reflection I appear to myself as an ego. Independently of reflection I am the me. In the world, as the me, I am a psycho-physical totality, a flesh and blood thinking, feeling, moving, human being.
Pre-reflexive consciousness is the ordinary awareness of objects in the external world that we exercise typically from morning to night. Reflexive consciousness is consciousness of consciousness: a new act of consciousness directed by consciousness onto itself. Reflexive consciousness is only intermittently exercised on pre-reflexive consciousness so the picture so far seems reasonably clear: There is pre-reflexive consciousness whenever we are conscious. From time to time we are self-conscious in that a new act of consciousness is directed onto consciousness by itself.
Sartre complicates this picture by saying that every consciousness is a consciousness of existing. Pre-ref lexive consciousness is conscious of itself and reflexive consciousness is conscious of itself. In addition to this, reflexive consciousness is an intermittent consciousness of pre-reflexive consciousness.
Why does Sartre present us with this complicated and barely coherent picture? He says, for example, consciousness is consciousness of itself rather than consciousness is conscious of itself, meaning that it is identical with the awareness it has of itself. What is the subject and the object of this awareness?
Sartre’s motivation is Cartesian and anti-Freudian. As we shall see in the discussions of bad faith and psychoanalysis (Chapters 11 and 13 below), Sartre thinks there is no unconscious. Indeed the idea of an unconscious mental state is contradictory and so impossible. He agrees with Descartes that if I am a mental state then I am aware of that mental state. All consciousness is therefore self-intimating or transparent. If that is so however, reflexive consciousness would seem to be redundant. Pre-reflexive, consciousness is already ‘a consciousness of itself so there is no need for reflection to inspect its states.
There are important differences between the self-intimations of pre-reflexive consciousness and the acts of reflexive consciousness. Not only is reflexive consciousness presented with an ego and pre-reflexive consciousness not presented with an ego (except, sometimes, the ego of another). Reflexive consciousness consists in a set of mental acts extra to or in addition to those of pre-reflexive consciousness. Reflexive-consciousness always only takes conscious states and the ego as its objects. Pre-reflexive consciousness takes external objects as its objects, as well as intimating its own mental states.
The findings of acts of reflective consciousness are incorrigible. The findings of acts of pre-reflexive consciousness are corrigible in so far as they are directed towards external objects. Sartre endorses the Cartesian epistemological thesis that if I believe I am in a mental state, internally or psychologically described, then that belief cannot be false. That awareness cannot be non-veridical. In the case of awareness of objects in the external world, however, there is always room for error. I may misidentify an object, ascribe to it a property it lacks or think there is an object where there is none. Reflexive consciousness delivers knowledge that is absolutely certain. If I believe I am in a conscious state it is impossible for me to be mistaken.
It is doubtful that this doctrine is true. Obviously, if it is true that I believe I am in a mental state then it follows validly that I am in at least one mental state viz. that state of belief. Not much more than this can be said with certainty however. This is not just because Sartre might be wrong about the non-existence of an unconscious mind. It is also because I may be caused to believe I am in a mental state by something other than my being in it. If Sartre is wrong and there is an unconscious mind then I may be in a mental state and not know I am in it, and I may believe I am in a mental state and that belief may be false.
Sartre, however, thinks the corrigible/incorrigible distinction marks another important difference between reflexive and pre-reflexive consciousness. Pre-reflexive conscious of external objects is corrigible. Reflexive conscious of consciousness is incorrigible.
This picture of self-consciousness depends on there being consciousness of objects outside the mind. Consciousness unifies itself only through its objects and only as unified can it be its own object. Intentionality depends upon on external objects, a unified consciousness depends on intentionality and self-consciousness depends upon a unified consciousness. Self-consciousness is therefore not only consistent with consciousness being embedded in the world, it presupposes it. We see here another way in which our being is being-in-the-world.
The Kantian I Think is a condition of possibility. The Cogito of Descartes and of Husserl is an apprehension of fact. We have heard of the “factual necessity” of the Cogito, and this phrase seems to me most apt. Also, it is undeniable that the Cogito is personal. In the I Think there is an I who thinks. We attain here the I in its purity, and it is indeed from the Cogito that an “Egology” must take its point of departure. The fact that can serve for a start is, then, this one: each time we apprehend our thought, whether by an immediate intuition or by an intuition based on memory, we apprehend an I which is the I of the apprehended thought, and which is given, in addition, as transcending this thought and all other possible thoughts. If, for example, I want to remember a certain landscape perceived yesterday from the train, it is possible for me to bring back the memory of that landscape as such. But I can also recollect that I was seeing that landscape. This is what Husserl calls, in Vorlesungen Zur Phänomenologie Des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, the possibility of reflecting in memory. In other words, I can always perform any recollection whatsoever in the personal mode, and at once the I appears. Such is the factual guarantee of the Kantian claim concerning validity. Thus it seems that there is not one of my consciousnesses which I do not apprehend as provided with an I.
But it must be remembered that all the writers who have described the Cogito have dealt with it as a reflective operation, that is to say, as an operation of the second degree. Such a Cogito is performed by a consciousness directed upon consciousness, a consciousness which takes consciousness as an object. Let us agree: the certitude of the Cogito is absolute, for, as Husserl said, there is an indissoluble unity of the reflecting consciousness and the reflected consciousness (to the point that the reflecting consciousness could not exist without the reflected consciousness). But the fact remains that we are in the presence of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, one of which is consciousness of the other. Thus the essential principle of phenomenology, “all consciousness is consciousness of something,” is preserved. Now, my reflecting consciousness does not take itself for an object when I effect the Cogito. What it affirms concerns the reflected consciousness. Insofar as my reflecting consciousness is consciousness of itself, it is non-positional consciousness. It becomes positional only by directing itself upon the reflected consciousness which itself was not a positional consciousness of itself before being reflected. Thus the consciousness which says I Think is precisely not the consciousness which thinks. Or rather it is not its own thought which it posits by this thetic act. We are then justified in asking ourselves if the I which thinks is common to the two superimposed consciousnesses, or if it is not rather the I of the reflected consciousness. All reflecting consciousness is, indeed, in itself unreflected, and a new act of the third degree is necessary in order to posit it. Moreover, there is no infinite regress here, since a consciousness has no need at all of a reflecting consciousness in order to be conscious of itself. It simply does not posit itself as an object.
But is it not precisely the reflective act which gives birth to the me in the reflected consciousness? Thus would be explained how every thought apprehended by intuition possesses an I, without falling into the difficulties noted in the preceding section. Husserl would be the first to acknowledge that an unreflected thought undergoes a radical modification in becoming reflected. But need one confine this modification to a loss of “naïveté”? Would not the appearance of the I be what is essential in this change?
One must evidently revert to a concrete experience, which may seem impossible, since by definition such an experience is reflective, that is to say, supplied with an I. But every unreflected consciousness, being non-thetic consciousness of itself, leaves a non-thetic memory that one can consult. To do so it suffices to try to reconstitute the complete moment in which this unreflected consciousness appeared (which by definition is always possible). For example, I was absorbed just now in my reading. I am going to try to remember the circumstances of my reading, my attitude, the lines that I was reading. I am thus going to revive not only these external details but a certain depth of unreflected consciousness, since the objects could only have been perceived by that consciousness and since they remain relative to it. That consciousness must not be posited as object of a reflection. On the contrary, I must direct my attention to the revived objects, but without losing sight of the unreflected consciousness, by joining in a sort of conspiracy with it and by drawing up an inventory of its content in a non-positional manner. There is no doubt about the result: while I was reading, there was consciousness of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was not inhabiting this consciousness. It was only consciousness of the object and non-positional consciousness of itself. I can now make these a-thetically apprehended results the object of a thesis and declare: there was no I in the unreflected consciousness. It should not be thought that this operation is artificial or conceived for the needs of the case. Thanks to this operation, evidently, Titchener could say in his Textbook of Psychology that the me was very often absent from his consciousness. He went no further, however, and did not attempt to classify the states of consciousness lacking a me.
It is undoubtedly tempting to object that this operation, this non-reflective apprehension of one consciousness by another consciousness, can evidently take place only by memory, and that therefore it does not profit from the absolute certitude inherent in a reflective act. We would then find ourselves, on the one hand, with an absolutely certain act which permits the presence of the I in the reflected consciousness to be affirmed, and, on the other hand, with a questionable memory which would purport to show the absence of the I from the unreflected consciousness. It would seem that we have no right to oppose the latter to the former. But I must point out that the memory of the unreflected consciousness is not opposed to the data of the reflective consciousness. No one would deny for a moment that the I appears in a reflected consciousness. It is simply a question of opposing a reflective memory of my reading (“I was reading”), which is itself of a questionable nature, to a non-reflective memory. The validity of a present reflection, in fact, does not reach beyond the consciousness presently apprehended. And reflective memory, to which we are obliged to have recourse in order to reinstate elapsed consciousnesses, besides its questionable character owing to its nature as memory, remains suspect since, in the opinion of Husserl himself, reflection modifies the spontaneous consciousness. Since, in consequence, all the non-reflective memories of unreflected consciousness show me a consciousness without a me, and since, on the other hand, theoretical considerations concerning consciousness which are based on intuition of essence have constrained us to recognize that the I cannot be a part of the internal structure of Erlebnisse, we must therefore conclude: there is no I on the unreflected level. When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. There is consciousness of the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, etc., and non-positional consciousness of consciousness. In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousnesses; it is they which present themselves with values, with attractive and repellent qualities— but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. And this is not a matter of chance, due to a momentary lapse of attention, but happens because of the very structure of consciousness.
This is what a description of the Cogito will make even more obvious to us. Can one say, indeed, that the reflective act apprehends the I and the thinking consciousness to the same degree and in the same way? Husserl insists on the fact that the certitude of the reflective act comes from apprehending consciousness without facets, without profiles, completely (without Abschattungen). This is evidently so. On the contrary, the spatio-temporal object always manifests itself through an infinity of aspects and is, at bottom, only the ideal unity of this infinity. As for meanings, or eternal truths, they affirm their transcendence in that the moment they appear they are given as independent of time, whereas the consciousness which apprehends them is, on the contrary, individuated through and through in duration. Now we ask: when a reflective consciousness apprehends the I Think, does it apprehend a full and concrete consciousness gathered into a real moment of concrete duration? The reply is clear: the I is not given as a concrete moment, a perishable structure of my actual consciousness. On the contrary, it affirms its permanence beyond this consciousness and all consciousnesses, and— although it scarcely resembles a mathematical truth—its type of existence comes much nearer to that of eternal truths than to that of consciousness.
Indeed, it is obvious that Descartes passed from the Cogito to the idea of thinking substance because he believed that I and think are on the same level. We have just seen that Husserl, although less obviously, is ultimately subject to the same reproach. I quite recognize that Husserl grants to the I a special transcendence which is not the transcendence of the object, and which one could call a transcendence “from above.” But by what right? And how account for this privileged treatment of the I if not by metaphysical and Critical preoccupations which have nothing to do with phenomenology? Let us be more radical and assert without fear that all transcendence must fall under the ὲποχή; thus, perhaps, we shall avoid writing such awkward chapters as Section Sixty-one of Ideen Zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologischen Philosophie. If the I in the I think affirms itself as transcendent, this is because the I is not of the same nature as transcendental consciousness.
Let us also note that the I Think does not appear to reflection as the reflected consciousness: it is given through reflected consciousness. To be sure, it is apprehended by intuition and is an object grasped with evidence. But we know what a service Husserl has rendered to philosophy by distinguishing diverse kinds of evidence. Well, it is only too certain that the I of the I Think is an object grasped with neither apodictic nor adequate evidence. The evidence is not apodictic, since by saying I we affirm far more than we know. It is not adequate, for the I is presented as an opaque reality whose content would have to be unfolded. To be sure, the I manifests itself as the source of consciousness. But that alone should make us pause. Indeed, for this very reason the I appears veiled, indistinct through consciousness, like a pebble at the bottom of the water. For this very reason the I is deceptive from the start, since we know that nothing but consciousness can be the source of consciousness.
In addition, if the I is a part of consciousness, there would then be two Ts: the I of the reflective consciousness and the I of the reflected consciousness. Fink, the disciple of Husserl, is even acquainted with a third I, disengaged by the ὲποχή, the I of transcendental consciousness. Hence the problem of the three Ts, whose difficulties Fink agreeably mentions. For us, this problem is quite simply insoluble. For it is inadmissible that any communication could be established between the reflective I and the reflected I if they are real elements of consciousness; above all, it is inadmissible that they may finally achieve identity in one unique I.
Byway of conclusion to this analysis, it seems to me that one can make the following statements:
First, the I is an existent. It has a concrete type of existence, undoubtedly different from the existence of mathematical truths, of meanings, or of spatio-temporal beings, but no less real. The I gives itself as transcendent.
Second, the I proffers itself to an intuition of a special kind which apprehends it, always inadequately, behind the reflected consciousness.
Third, the I never appears except on the occasion of a reflective act. In this case, the complex structure of consciousness is as follows: there is an unreflected act of reflection, without an I, which is directed on a reflected consciousness. The latter becomes the object of the reflecting consciousness without ceasing to affirm its own object (a chair, a mathematical truth, etc.). At the same time, a new object appears which is the occasion for an affirmation by reflective consciousness, and which is consequently not on the same level as the unreflected consciousness (because the latter consciousness is an absolute which has no need of reflective consciousness in order to exist), nor on the same level as the object of the reflected consciousness (chair, etc.). This transcendent object of the reflective act is the I.
Fourth, the transcendent I must fall before the stroke of phenomenological reduction. The Cogito affirms too much. The certain content of the pseudo-“Cogito” is not “I have consciousness of this chair,” but “There is consciousness of this chair.” This content is sufficient to constitute an infinite and absolute field of investigation for phenomenology.
Any study of human reality must begin with the cogito. But the Cartesian “I think” is conceived in the instantaneous perspective of temporality. Can we find in the heart of the cogito a way of transcending this instantaneity? If human reality were limited to the being of the “I think,” it would have only the truth of an instant. And it is indeed true that with Descartes the cogito is an instantaneous totality, since by itself it makes no claim on the future and since an act of continuous “creation” is necessary to make it pass from one instant to another. But can we even conceive of the truth of an instant? Does the cogito not in its own way engage both past and future? Heidegger is so persuaded that the “I think” of Husserl is a trap for larks, fascinating and ensnaring, that he has completely avoided any appeal to consciousness in his description of Dasein. His goal is to show it immediately as care; that is, as escaping itself in the project of self toward the possibilities which it is. It is this projection of the self outside the self which he calls “understanding” (Verstand) and which permits him to establish human reality as being a “revealing-revealed.” But this attempt to show first the escape from self of the Dasein is going to encounter in turn insurmountable difficulties; we cannot first suppress the dimension “consciousness,” not even if it is in order to re-establish it subsequently. Understanding has meaning only if it is consciousness of understanding. My possibility can exist as my possibility only if it is my consciousness which escapes itself toward my possibility. Otherwise the whole system of being and its possibilities will fall into the unconscious—that is into the in-itself. Behold, we are thrown back again towards the cogito. We must make this our point of departure. Can we extend it without losing the benefits of reflective evidence? What has the description of the for-itself revealed to us?
First we have encountered a nihilation in which the being of the for-itself is affected in its being. This revelation of nothingness did not seem to us to pass beyond the limits of the cogito. But let us consider more closely.
The for-itself can not sustain nihilation without determining itself as a lack of being. This means that the nihilation does not coincide with a simple introduction of emptiness into consciousness. An external being has not expelled the in-itself from consciousness; rather the for-itself is perpetually determining itself not to be the in-itself. This means that it can establish itself only in terms of the in-itself and against the in-itself. Thus since the nihilation is the nihilation of being, it represents the original connection between the being of the for-itself and the being of the in-itself. The concrete, real in-itself is wholly present to the heart of consciousness as that which consciousness determines itself not to be. The cogito must necessarily lead us to discover this total, out-of-reach presence of the in-itself. Of course the fact of this presence will be the very transcendence of the for-itself. But it is precisely the nihilation which is the origin of transcendence conceived as the original bond between the for-itself and the in-itself. Thus we catch a glimpse of a way of getting out of the cogito. We shall see later indeed that the profound meaning of the cogito is essentially to refer outside itself. But it is not yet time to describe this characteristic of the for-itself. What our ontological description has immediately revealed is that this being is the foundation of itself as a lack of being; that is, that it determines its being by means of a being which it is not.
Nevertheless there are many ways of not being and some of them do not touch the inner nature of the being which is not what it is not. If, for example, I say of an inkwell that it is not a bird, the inkwell and the bird remain untouched by the negation. This is an external relation which can be established only by a human reality acting as witness. By contrast, there is a type of negation which establishes an internal relation between what one denies and that concerning which the denial is made.1
Of all internal negations, the one which penetrates most deeply into being, the one which constitutes in its being the being concerning which it makes the denial along with the being which it denies—this negation is lack. This lack does not belong to the nature of the in-itself, which is all positivity. It appears in the world only with the upsurge of human reality. It is only in the human world that there can be lacks. A lack presupposes a trinity: that which is missing or “the lacking,” that which misses what is lacking or “the existing,” and a totality which has been broken by the lacking and which would be restored by the synthesis of “the lacking” and “the existing”—this is “the lacked.”2 The being which is released to the intuition of human reality is always that to which something is lacking—i.e., the existing. For example, if I say that the moon is not full and that one quarter is lacking, I base this judgment on full intuition of the crescent moon. Thus what is released to intuition is an in-itself which by itself is neither complete nor incomplete but which simply is what it is, without relation with other beings. In order for this in-itself to be grasped as the crescent moon, it is necessary that a human reality surpass the given toward the project of the realized totality—here the disk of the full moon—and return toward the given to constitute it as the crescent moon; that is, in order to realize it in its being in terms of the totality which becomes its foundation. In this same surpassing the lacking will be posited as that whose synthetic addition to the existing will reconstitute the synthetic totality of the lacked. In this sense the lacking is of the same nature as the existing; it would suffice to reverse the situation in order for it to become the existing to which the lacking is missing, while the existing would become the lacking. This lacking as the complement of the existing is determined in its being by the synthetic totality of the lacked. Thus in the human world, the incomplete being which is released to intuition as lacking is constituted in its being by the lacked—that is, by what it is not. It is the full moon which confers on the crescent moon its being as crescent; what-is-not determines what-is. It is in the being of the existing, as the correlate of a human transcendence, to lead outside itself to the being which it is not—as to its meaning.
Human reality by which lack appears in the world must be itself a lack. For lack can come into being only through lack; the in-itself can not be the occasion of lack in the in-itself. In other words, in order for being to be lacking or lacked, it is necessary that a being make itself its own lack; only a being which lacks can surpass being toward the lacked.
The existence of desire as a human fact is sufficient to prove that human reality is a lack. In fact how can we explain desire if we insist on viewing it as a psychic state; that is, as a being whose nature is to be what it is? A being which is what it is, to the degree that it is considered as being what it is, summons nothing to itself in order to complete itself. An incomplete circle does not call for completion unless it is surpassed by human transcendence. In-itself it is complete and perfectly positive as an open curve. A psychic state which existed with the sufficiency of this curve could not possess in addition the slightest “appeal to” something else; it would be itself without any relation to what is not it. In order to constitute it as hunger or thirst, an external transcendence surpassing it toward the totality “satisfied hunger” would be necessary, just as the crescent moon is surpassed toward the full moon.
We will not get out of the difficulty by making desire a conatus conceived in the manner of a physical force. For the conatus once again, even if we grant it the efficiency of a cause, can not possess in itself the character of a reaching out toward another state. The conatus as the producer of states can not be identified with desire as the appeal from a state. Neither will recourse to psycho-physiological parallelism enable us better to clear away the difficulties. Thirst as an organic phenomenon, as a “physiological” need of water, does not exist. An organism deprived of water presents certain positive phenomena: for example, a certain coagulating thickening of the blood, which provokes in turn certain other phenomena. The ensemble is a positive state of the organism which refers only to itself, exactly as the thickening of a solution from which the water has evaporated can not be considered by itself as the solution’s desire of water. If we suppose an exact correspondence between the mental and the physiological, this correspondence can be established only on the basis of ontological identity, as Spinoza has seen. Consequently the being of psychic thirst will be the being in itself of a state, and we are referred once again to a transcendent witness. But then the thirst will be desire for this transcendence but not for itself; it will be desire in the eyes of another. If desire is to be able to be desire to itself it must necessarily be itself transcendence; that is, it must by nature be an escape from itself toward the desired object. In other words, it must be a lack—but not an object-lack, a lack undergone, created by the surpassing which it is not; it must be its own lack of —. Desire is a lack of being. It is haunted in its inmost being by the being of which it is desire. Thus it bears witness to the existence of lack in the being of human reality. But if human reality is lack, then it is through human reality that the trinity of the existing, the lacking and the lacked comes into being. What exactly are the three terms of this trinity?
That which plays here the role of the existing is what is released to the cogito as the immediate of the desire; for example, it is this for-itself which we have apprehended as not being what it is and being what it is not. But how are we to define the lacked?
To answer this question, we must return to the idea of lack and determine more exactly the bend which unites the existing to the lacking. This bond can not be one of simple contiguity. If what is lacking is in its very absence still profoundly present at the heart of the existing, it is because the existing and the lacking are at the same moment apprehended and surpassed in the unity of a single totality. And that which constitutes itself as lack can do so only by surpassing itself toward one great broken form. Thus lack is appearance on the ground of a totality. Moreover it matters little whether this totality has been originally given and is now broken (e.g. “The arms of the Venus di Milo are now lacking”) or whether it has never yet been realized, (e.g. “He lacks courage.”) What is important is only that the lacking and the existing are given or are apprehended as about to be annihilated in the unity of the totality which is lacked. Everything which is lacking is lacking to — for —. What is given in the unity of a primitive upsurge is the for, conceived as not yet being or as not being any longer, an absence toward which the curtailed existing surpasses itself or is surpassed and thereby constitutes itself as curtailed. What is the for of human reality?
The for-itself, as the foundation of itself, is the upsurge of the negation. The for-itself founds itself in so far as it denies in relation to itself a certain being or a mode of being. What it denies or nihilates, as we know, is being-in-itself. But no matter what being-in-itself: human reality is before all else its own nothingness. What it denies or nihilates in relation to itself as for-itself can be only itself. The meaning of human reality as nihilated is constituted by this nihilation and this presence in it of what it nihilates; hence the self-as-being-in-itself is what human reality lacks and what makes its meaning. Since human reality in its primitive relation to itself is not what it is, its relation to itself is not primitive and can derive its meaning only from an original relation which is the null relation or identity. It is the self which would be what it is which allows the for-itself to be apprehended as not being what it is; the relation denied in the definition of the for-itself—which as such should be first posited—is a relation (given as perpetually absent) between the for-itself and itself in the mode of identity. The meaning of the subtle confusion by which thirst escapes and is not thirst (in so far as it is consciousness of thirst), is a thirst which would be thirst and which haunts it. What the for-itself lacks is the self—or itself as in-itself.
Nevertheless we must not confuse this missing in itself (the lacked) with that of facticity. The in-itself of facticity in its failure to found itself is reabsorbed in pure presence in the world on the part of the for-itself The missing in-itself, on the other hand is pure absence. Moreover the failure of the act to found the in-itself has caused the for-itself to rise up from the in-itself as the foundation of its own nothingness. But the meaning of the missing act of founding remains as transcendent. The for-itself in its being is failure because it is the foundation only of itself as nothingness. In truth this failure is its very being, but it has meaning only if the for-itself apprehends itself as failure in the presence of the being which it has failed to be; that is, of the being which would be the foundation of its being and no longer merely the foundation of its nothingness—or, to put it another way, which would be its foundation as coincidence with itself. By nature the cogito refers to the lacking and to the lacked, for the cogito is haunted by being, as Descartes well realized.
Such is the origin of transcendence. Human reality is its own surpassing toward what it lacks; it surpasses itself toward the particular being which it would be if it were what it is. Human reality is not something which exists first in order afterwards to lack this or that; it exists first as lack and in immediate, synthetic connection with what it lacks. Thus the pure event by which human reality rises as a presence in the world is apprehended by itself as its own lack. In its coming into existence human reality grasps itself as an incomplete being. It apprehends itself as being in so far as it is not, in the presence of the particular totality which it lacks and which it is in the form of not being it and which is what it is. Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never given. If the cogito reaches toward being, it is because by its very thrust it surpasses itself toward being by qualifying itself in its being as the being to which coincidence with self is lacking in order for it to be what it is. The cogito is indissolubly linked to being-in-itself, not as a thought to its object—which would make the in-itself relative—but as a lack to that which defines its lack. In this sense the second Cartesian proof is rigorous. Imperfect being surpasses itself toward perfect being; the being which is the foundation only of its nothingness surpasses itself toward the being which is the foundation of its being. But the being toward which human reality surpasses itself is not a transcendent God; it is at the heart of human reality; it is only human reality itself as totality.
This totality is not the pure and simple contingent in-itself of the transcendent. If what consciousness apprehends as the being toward which it surpasses itself were the pure in-itself, it would coincide with the annihilation of consciousness. But consciousness does not surpass itself toward it annihilation; it does not want to lose itself in the in-itself of identity at the limit of its surpassing. It is for the for-itself as such that the for-itself lays claim to being-in-itself.
Thus this perpetually absent being which haunts the for-itself is itself fixed in the in-itself. It is the impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself: it would be its own foundation not as nothingness but as being and would preserve within it the necessary translucency of consciousness along with the coincidence with itself of being-in-itself. It would preserve in it that turning back upon the self which conditions every necessity and every foundation. But this return to the self would be without distance; it would not be presence to itself, but identity with itself. In short, this being would be exactly the self which we have shown can exist only as a perpetually evanescent relation, but it would be this self as substantial being. Thus human reality arises as such in the presence of its own totality or self as a lack of that totality. And this totality can not be given by nature, since it combines in itself the incompatible characteristics of the in-itself and the for-itself.
Let no one reproach us with capriciously inventing a being of this kind; when by a further movement of thought the being and absolute absence of this totality are hypostasized as transcendence beyond the world, it takes on the name of God. Is not God a being who is what he is—in that he is all positivity and the foundation of the world—and at the same time a being who is not what he is and who is what he is not—in that he is self-consciousness and the necessary foundation of himself? The being of human reality is suffering because it rises in being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it, precisely because it could not attain the in-itself without losing itself as for-itself. Human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.
1 Hegelian opposition belongs to this type of negation. But this opposition must itself be based on an original internal negation; that is, on lack. For example, if the non-essential becomes in its turn the essential, this is because it is experienced as a lack in the heart of the essential.
2 Le manquant, “the lacking,” l’existant, “the existing”; le manqué, “the lacked.” Le manque is “the lack.” At times when manqué is used as an adjective, I have translated it as “missing,” e.g., l’en-soi manqué, “the missing in-itself.” Tr.